title: Magento product configuration and color swatches
body: <p>I'm setting up a swimwear catalog and I'm hoping someone can give me some guidance for setting up the products properly. </p>
  
  <p>This is essentially what I want to do:
  <a href="http://www.nafnaf.com/fr/robe.html/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nafnaf.com/fr/robe.html/</a></p>
  
  <p>I found this extension and it does pretty much the same thing:
  <a href="http://cjmcreativedesigns.com/pre-select-colors-plus-swatches.html" rel="nofollow">http://cjmcreativedesigns.com/pre-select-colors-plus-swatches.html</a></p>
  
  <p>I like this plugin because it does color swatches on the list and details page and on the layered navigation in Magento. The process for this plugin is to setup a configurable product (Swimsuit A) and a simple product for each corresponding color (Swimsuit A - Red, Swimsuit A - B etc). When viewing the configurable product (Swimsuit A) and you click on a swatch it will load all the images from the simple product and populate the preview and thumbnails.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know of a way I can automate this somehow or know of a better way I can make the color swatches work without setting up tons of simple products? The only thing I've come up with is to use this plugin:</p>
  
  <p>Automatic Configurables
  <a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/automatic-configurables.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/automatic-configurables.html</a></p>
  
  <p>Which will automate creating simple products for configurables.</p>
  
  <p>If anyone has any feedback I'd be really grateful. </p>