Multiple Attribute Sets on Configurable Products

Question

I have a Magento store with almost 2000 simple products.

I need to feed in a selection of configurable products to eBay using M2E Pro.

To do this, I'm condensing my main categories into single configurable products (to be visible on eBay only), where via dropdowns you would first select the product type then size.

Everything was going fine until I discovered that some of the simple products have been created using different attribute sets to each other, and Magento's configurable products set up doesn't allow more than 1 attribute set to be used when creating a product.

In essence I'm trying to create configurable products that use 2 attribute sets. Is this possible without having to install a plugin to change all of the attribute sets to use the same set? That just seems dangerous and messy.

I hope that makes sense, it's hard to explain!

Answer 1

First, take a look at this question: Configurable products and attribute set. It seams there is a reason for having one attribute set per configurable products. I had this issue but took the save approach and changed the attribute sets of some products.
But if you care to take a risk, you can modify the method Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Catalog_Product_Edit_Tab_Super_Config_Grid::_prepareCollection and remove this line ->addFieldToFilter('attribute_set_id',$product->getAttributeSetId()). This will allow you to see simple products from different attribute sets.
On frontend it doesn't seam to be a verification about the attributes set, so this should be enough.
But please test a lot before going in production with this. I don't know the full implications of this change.