Displaying all categories that a product appears in as part of product info

[marlbly]

Hi everybody

I'm sure there's an easy answer to this, at least I hope so anyway.

I'm setting up zen cart for a client of mine who has an inventory with over 15,000 products, (I can't quite make up my mind - dream client or nightmare client) with no easy way to create a particularly good category system, as many of the products are minor variations and however I go about it, many many products will end up in many many categories.

What I would like to do is be able to display on the product page, every category that the item appears in.

Also to have it display as a link to those categories. So that for example, say a customer is browsing items that are "big and "red", (the item is contained both within the "big" category and the "red" category), and they decide,
"Well, I'm not sure about the red, let's see what else there is that is big". Customer clicks on "big" and it takes them to the "big" category.

Also I'm wondering if it is possible to do a search by category title? So for example doing a search for "big red" will pull up every item that is in both the "red" and the "big" categories. Is it also possible to do anything like a synonym match so if they did a search for "large red" it would generate the same search result?

Any pointers in the right direction would be very much appreciated.

[rstevenson]

I just had a look at my retail site, to see if I could glean any clues from it. (I don't do what you're looking for, but my products are all cross referenced in at least two categories each.)

I noticed that when I access a product through the artists category, the bread crumbs of course say home/artists.../artist name/product name, and when I access the same product through another category, the bread crumbs say, for example, home/landscape/product name.

This strongly suggests you could look at how the bread crumbs code is figuring out where it is, and transfer some of that code down into the product description area to do what you want. Are you good with PHP?

As for search, I just tried entering one of my category titles into the search box and got zero hits. I wonder if you would get better results by incorporating a Google site search into the store?

Rob

[marlbly]

Thanks so much! I think I can make both of those work. I'm not a php expert, but I think I can handle the code enough to do that.

Google search will probably work, was hoping for something native, but it will have to do I guess. Would be great if you could assign something equivalent to meta data tags to products. Though google might be better in some ways.

If I get it to work, I'll make sure I post back how I managed it.

Thanks!