Magento – Clone custom options

This is not a very elegant solution - but if you must use custom options and you have access / ability to modify the theme I suggest the following:

• Relocate container1 and container2 in your template - these are called via getChildChildHtml('',true,true) in the base theme

-or-

• Name the options via a naming convention; e.g. "Region 1 - Option 1", "Region 2 - Option 2", etc.

• In the template, parse the name of all options and store in two separate arrays to be output later.

For the second option - get a list of options from a product:

$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($product_id);
$options = $product->getOptions();

Parse through the options and filter by naming convention:

$region1 = array();
$region2 = array();
foreach($options as $option){
    if($option->getType()!='drop_down'){
       if(stripos($option,'Region 1 - ')!==false){
            $region1[] = array_pop(explode('Region 1 - ', $option));
        } elseif(stripos($option,'Region 1 - ')!==false){
            $region2[] = array_pop(explode('Region 2 - ', $option));
        }
    }
}

Now loop over $region1 and $region2, echoing as you go.

foreach($region1 as $option){
    echo $option;
}

I think this is not possible out of the box.

The intuitiv way: Creating a configurable and two simples one with tax and one without won't work, because for the price calculation only the price and tax setting of the configurable is used.

I think there are two ways to achieve this:

1. Change the way this is handled and use the price and the tax setting of the simple
2. Hook into one of the add to cart events and add only the simple (then you have the problem that you can't click it if it is not visible or you have to add a rewrite or build an observer which redirects from the simple to the configurable)