Overview – Vehicle Options Tab

This is one of the most powerful features in WPSuperDealer and it’s important to understand the core concepts used to set up your vehicle types.

You can find the vehicle options tab by going to dashboard, vehicle, settings

When you click on the vehicle options tab you’ll find the standard tips and tricks section

Which we highly suggest you give a quick glance

Followed by the global specifications section

These global fields are a part of every vehicle type

You may click on them to access some additional settings

You can disable them globally, set default values, or change their labels, 

But these changes apply to every vehicle and should not be recreated in their own specifications

Below the global specifications you’ll find a small form where you can add your own custom vehicle type, like tractors

After creating your custom type you’ll need to add your own groups, specifications and, options

You can also click on the link below the form and access the default vehicle types

They can be added by just clicking on them

Let’s take a look at one of the vehicle types and explore some of the different ways you can setup your vehicles for editing

After opening a vehicle type you’ll see several sections

In the top left is a button that allows you to remove the type

To the right of that you’ll see a small form that lets you change the icon associated with the type you’re editing

The icons are only shown on the vehicle edit page, and are not shown on the front end

Below this you’ll find the specifications section, and the options section

Specification fields are the fields that store specific, unique information about a vehicle

Examples would include mileage, number of doors, exterior color, etcetera

Options are a bit different from specifications

You can think of them as items a vehicle either has, or does not have

Examples include things like, remote start, electric windows, trailer hitches, and so on

Both specifications, and options, can placed into groups

Options not only have a top level group, but they also have a sub level group

Not all dealers will want their specifications or options to be grouped

In these cases you may turn off grouping

When turning off the groups you’ll find all of your specifications, for that vehicle type, become grouped together and you can do the same thing to the options

Specification fields can also be used for searching and sorting your vehicles

If you’ll be using multiple vehicle types then we suggest using similar specification names between vehicle types, where applicable, to simplify searching and sorting vehicles.

For example, if your site sells R.V’s and automobiles, then you probably want to make sure you have mileage as a specification field for both

If you click on a specification, you’ll find a small form that will let you turn your field into a taxonomy, which is a fancy way of saying you can make it a type of category

When a field becomes a taxonomy it gives you the ability to lock down the values so users can only select from a preset list

For example, let’s look at the body style field

Let’s edit a vehicle so you can see what this looks like

As it sits right now it’s just a normal field where users can enter whatever value they want

You’ll notice the vehicle details section now has a place where we can select the specific vehicle type

Since this vehicle didn’t have a vehicle type already selected, WPSuperDealer selected the first vehicle type as a default

Automobiles was the original type, so by virtue of being first it becomes the vehicle type for any vehicle that doesn’t already have a vehicle type

Let’s scroll down to the specifications section and find the body style

Notice that it’s just a normal field that we can type any value into

Pretend we only want our users to select car, truck, or van

We don’t want someone to be able to enter what they want

If we did then we might have some users entering pickup as a type, and some entering truck

You could also end up with some people entering sedan, and some people just entering car

WPSuperDealer has a way for you to control what values can be selected for any specification field

To see how this is done we’ll go back to our vehicle options tab, and select the body style field for automobile

We’ll register it as a taxonomy and toggle the restrict options toggle to on

We still need a way to create the values, so we’ll also select the turn on taxonomy ui toggle

Now let’s save our vehicle options

You’ll now see body style as a menu item under vehicles in the left hand admin menu

This is why we turned on the show taxonomy ui option

If we click on it we’ll see a standard WordPress taxonomy page

Here we can add car, truck, and van

When we go back to our vehicle edit page and refresh it, we’ll find the body style field has now become a drop down

If you go back to the options tab you can change the label for the field, or set a default value

Keep in mind, you shouldn’t duplicate fields that are already global specifications

Those fields already exist as part of each vehicle type and duplicating them isn’t recommended at this time

Let’s go back to our vehicle options, and turn off the taxonomy ui

Now we don’t need to worry about users going in through the taxonomy ui and adding or removing body styles

Since we have automobiles, and r.v’s as vehicle types we might want to have a single field visitors can use to search body style on both vehicle type

The first problem is that r.v’s don’t call it body style, they call it the r.v’s, class

Essentially a body style and a class type are the same, so let’s add body style to r.v’s, then change it’s label to class

If we decide to add body style to the search form, we can label it as type, then allow users to search on it

Let’s move on to the vehicle options

We’ve already seen how we can turn off the groups, but you can also allow users to simply type in a list of options in a text box

Let’s do that to the r.v’s and then take a look at our vehicle edit page

Right now this vehicle is an automobile, and you’ll see how users can toggle on and off their options

When we scroll down we’ll see there’s a second place, closer to the specifications, where you can change the vehicle type

When we change it to rvs, we’ll see the option toggles have been replaced by a text area where users can just enter a comma delimited list of any options they want

You’ve now seen a brief view of the vehicle options tab, and the different ways you can setup your vehicle types, options and specifications

In our next video we’ll look at setting up our search form and how the options setup here can be used by visitors on the front end to find their next vehicle