Magento 1.5.0.1 configurable products attributes not showing in front end

Question

We have a Magento store on 1.5.0.1 Community Edition which uses configurable products with attribute sets to allow customers to select their preferred size and colour for a specific item (e.g., a shirt).

Each clothing range has its own attribute set, which was used to create the product, with simple products for each permutation of the product for stock keeping purposes.

We've compared all of the product's settings, and can't see any discrepancies between them, and yet one product range does not display the attribute drop-downs and add-to-cart button in the frontend, despite appearing in the frontend fine other than that.

Answer 1

Usually when the add-to-cart button does not display it is because your product has no inventory set. Remember that the configurable product needs to be set to in stock and the associated simple products have to have at least one item with non-zero inventory and be set as 'in stock'.

Answer 2

I don't know if you have already found a solution, but after searching for a whole day, I've found what's causing the missing attributes in the front end for me... After deleting and readding simple products for a dozen times and making notes on the way I was quite sure that I correctly added simple and configurable products, so the problem has to be somewhere else. A casual look at the console in FireBug revealed a conflict in prototype.js... that's strange, since Magento comes with it. And I sure have not changed anything in it!

Did you at one point added jQuery to your Magento installation? If so, you HAVE to add 'jQuery.noComflict;' to the end of your jQuery file and the critical point is, to include the jQuery file BEFORE the prototype.js: The prototype.js is loaded by Magento in default/layout/page.xml at the beginning, so you have to add this line befor the prototype.js jquery/jquery-1.2.6.noConflict.min.js

If you don't do that the drobdown item is shown but with not selectable entries, that's because the js/varien/product.js relies on the prototype.js to work. Without it your list won't be populated!

Hope it helps anyone searching for this mysterious problem... (the problem is also described here: Weird Chrome prototype/jQuery conflict)