June 2011

Text fields are useful for when you have a product that can be personalized such as wrappers, monogrammed clothing, etc. The text fields provide a means for your customers to enter their information such as a name, birth date, or some other bit of information that a dropdown or radio button would not allow for. Adding the text fields are very similar to adding other attributes and we'll go through the process below.

To get started we will need to define some product attributes. By doing this one time, it makes it possible to skip this step in the future and move right to assigning the attributes to the products.

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To get started we'll need to go to the Attribute Controller:

CATALOG > ATTRIBUTES CONTROLLER

 and start by adding a name for our option. What you're looking for is the first line under the very first tan coloured bar, there will be an "en:" followed by a blank box there. This is where we'll name it something like "Name to be Printed". The sort order is important here if you will be adding several text fields and want them in order, so if needed, number them accordingly and remember the smaller number will show first ( example 1 will be first followed by 2 below it, 3 below 2 ).

Under OPTION TYPE you need to change it from Dropdown to TEXT so that the cart knows to insert a blank text field there.

Click on the   button to option to the cart.

Once you've click on the button you'll be at a screen where you can either add more names for the options, edit them, or delete the. At this point you can either leave the text field as it is, or adjust some of the other settings such as size and the maximum number of characters that can be entered into the field. The default is a text box that is 32 characters long and allows for 32 characters to be entered.

If you click on the button, you will be taken to a screen where you can adjust these settings. ROWS will let you add more then one row, useful for like address fields or for long sentences. The DISPLAY SIZE will let you adjust the visual size of the text block based on characters, an entry of 50 will create a space 50 characters long. MAXIMUM LENGTH is where you can define just how many characters can be entered into the text field. Useful for if you want to limit the characters a person can enter, say for instance if you are doing single letter monograms and only want them to enter in a single letter, you would change this option to 1. Once you've done all you want, click on the button to save your changes.

From here we deviate from the previous method of adding attributes to our products because we don't have to set any option values since we want the customers to enter their text in the block we've created. What we need to do next is add this attribute to a product.

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Let's assume you're looking at your product listing, what you want to do is click on the button located to the right of the product information. This will take you to the Attribute Controller. You can also get there by following this like:

 ADMIN > CATALOG > ATTRIBUTES CONTROLLER

As with adding other options to the products we're going to be scrolling down to where it says ADDING NEW ATTRIBUTES in the tan section. Here you will see two large white fields with your products name over them. The first one is called OPTION NAME, and here is where we select the name of the text field option we created in step 1, in this case "Name to be Printed".

The next field is titled OPTION VALUE and we will be selecting the only available value that comes up, TEXT/UPLOAD FILE.

For the sake of expediency I'll forego explaining the prices and weights as there are a great many things you can change here to affect pricing, play with them and experiment. So go ahead and click on the button to add your text field to the product.

If you want to add more options you can do so at any time and you can mix and match them as well. If you look at the final picture you can see a sample of the product now with the new text field there.

Now, you will be able to see what they entered in the admin section on their invoice and it will also show up in the order email you get when the customer places an order.

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