Hi Shotan,
Using variations the way you did may not have been the best architectural decision. Here’s why…
When you create a variation under the hood you create a record (WordPress Post) for each combination of the attributes. Each of those records can have all the typical product attributes.
So if you have 5 sizes and 5 colors for every product you apply the variation to, you will create 25 records. Not a huge number of records for WordPress Also, this works well because these 25 items roughly correspond to the items you would want to track inventory on.
The problem happens when you try to do something like add more attributes. Add 5 options for a front decoration, add 5 options for a back decoration, add a neckline style with 3 options. Now instead of 25 records you have 1875, plus all the attributes that each record gets.
It’s easy to see that if you start adding a lot of products your WordPress site starts needing a lot of horsepower to manipulate a large amount of data.
The way we handled this in a similar situation is to use at most two dimensions of variations on products. We chose size and color. All of the other options were handled as attributes on the product. In this way we were able to create a site with well over 100,000 product variations, each variation could have an arbitrary number of additional attributes. In the application that we created those attributes are things like custom text, decoration colors, front design, back design hardware color. The selection of some attributes changes the product price, others don’t change the product price.
You need detailed knowledge of wp-e-commerce to be able to implement this, but it works really well in the application we built. We implemented the above as plugins. You can see it in action at https://www.sparkle-gear.com
