Quote Originally Posted by hephaestus View Post
(I do kind of like PL13's idea of using an attribute to select a particular class section by date, and if I were starting from scratch I might do it that way.
On second thought, no. I would not do it with options.

First off, each section of a class also has a fair bit of descriptive info that needs to be displayed to the user in a clean way, for instance:

[FONT="Garamond"]Section A
Mondays 7-10pm
Feb 1-Apr 12; no class Feb 15
10 sessions
Class size: 8
Faculty: John Smith[/FONT]

Perhaps this kind of info could be represented using an attribute. I'm pretty sure I'd need to use radio buttons, because I'd want a prospective student to be able to see all of a class's section options at once, and they'd look horrible presented in a drop-down menu.

But the bigger problem is that attributes need to be defined independent of products, and then associated to them as a second step. What a tremendous PITA that would be, given that the school offers ~100 courses in ~250 sections per quarter.

So each section really does need to be a separate product. Now that I think back about it, this is just the kind of analysis that I went through to decide that I needed to use the "Master Products" contrib under osCommerce.

Anyone have any thoughts on how much work it would be to port that osCommerce contrib to Zen Cart? Or other thoughts on how to accomplish this in Zen Cart?

Thanks,

Michael