Adding Custom Product Features - Modifying Database, Admin and Storefront Files

[furiousfurryfox]

Hello everyone,

I am a new user of AbanteCart and am looking to customize aspects of my admin and storefront. Before I do, I would like to seek the advice of board members more experienced, to see if I am on the right track.

Currently I need to add custom features to the product description tab (instead of having them appear on a separate tab like in extension Product Features or Attributes) so that they appear together with the default features Availability, Model and Manufacturer. Some like SKU and Length are already in the database, others like Year of Release and Country of Release I need to create. Products will be bulk uploaded with import and export functionality as per normal.

In order to achieve this, it seems what I just need to do is as follows, but I feel that I am missing something (or doing something wrong):

1) Manually add new columns for required features to products table through phpMyAdmin.
2) Modify admin/controller/pages/catalog/product.php so that features can be edited through backend Edit Product page.
3) Modify storefront/controller/pages/product/product.php so that features appear on frontend product description tab.

Additionally, before I start working on these files, I will make a copy of them as well as backup the database. But what does 'Layout and dataset load XML' do? And need I make a copy of all the datasets in Datasets Manager as well?

Thanks for your time and help!

[abantecart]

You are on the right track. You missed data model  admin/model/catalog/product.php

Layout is used to set a display of elements on a storefront pages. You will not need that.
Dataset can be used to store some supporting data without SQL changes

Check these manuals.
http://www.abantecart.com/document_wiki/index.php/Developing_Templates_as_Extensions
http://www.abantecart.com/document_wiki/index.php/Developing_Extensions_and_Extension_API#Database_extension

Please note:  We do suggest to use extension approach as much as possible. This will save you time on future updates and upgrades.

[furiousfurryfox]

Thank you for responding to my inquiry, abantecart. I will research more on extensions before I start modifying any files.

Reading those manuals you linked, I don't think using datasets is suitable for me as all product information needs to be stored in a single csv file for ease of use.

EDIT: Thinking about it a little more, I am wondering if I will need to also modify AbanteCart's import and export functionality as well to work with and display these additional fields?