1.3.9d
Local site only at present

Hi all,

I am trying to to create a drop down list, i've searched the forum but can only find alpha sorter questions.

I have at present created several search boxes which would help customers find products they are looking for quickly, it's based on "music" & "the book store" add on, which strangly, I cannot get working on my system, I've just looked at the demo's linked from this site?

So for simplicity, say the site sells cars, I can use my search boxes to find
Manufactures (ford, GM , Ferrari ect)
Type of car (saloon, estate, convertable, ect)
Engine size
Colour
& so on

But if I have 1000's of cars instock, I would still have to trawl through 100's of listings in each search.
I don't want to click the header to sort by "price" "Description" "colour" ect, which is standard in Zen cart, what I actually want to do is refine the search.
So if I click "ford" all my listings for ford appear BUT then I want to refine my search by having drop downs for "colour" "engine size" ect, NOT to sort them but select the "red"cars from the ford section & drop all the others.

What I have looked at so far:

If I select manufactures, I retieve all my listings for said manufacturer BUT I also have another drop down to "select by category" This is the fuction I have been working with but without success.

The ideal solution would be

1st drop menu - list car types (Saloon, estate & convertable ect)
The selection made would then populate the
2nd drop down box (Ford, GM, Ferrari ect)

It's the population of the second & third drop downs which appear to be the holy grail.

So my quetions are:

Has anyone actually achieved this or similar?
Is it possible, commercially or otherwise?

If this is possible commercially, who would write such a script?

Sorry for the long post but hopefully it will make the "quest" clear.

TIA