Linked Products - Different Attributes

[salsy]

Hi there, I have a baby clothes zen cart store. I have a shoe which can go into multiple categories i.e baby girl, baby boy, girls 3-7. I want to add the product once and link it to the different categories. However, i only want the sizes or attributues relevant to those categories to show up in those categories.

I know that i can copy or duplicate the product to do this, however then when i search by manufacturer i see the same product appear several times and it looks strange..

[kuroi]

This is not possible in core Zen Cart, though at Kuroi we have managed to build it into a client's site. You can see it at www.simplyschoolwear.co.uk where each "school" is a category, but they share a products from a common pool with colors and sizes being restricted for each category to reflect the school's official uniform policy and the ages of the children in their intake.

However, this was a very major undertaking that required surgical incisions into a number of key areas in Zen Cart's core code. I'd rate this as requiring good PHP and database skills and expert knowledge of Zen Cart's architecture.

If you want to have a go, the starting point would be to extend the products to categories table to hold a list of the the attributes allowed for each category-product pairing. You'd then need to expand out from there to build maintenance and catalog display facilities that suit your specific requirements.