Link category to work same way as a linked product, possible?

[dedj]

Hi.

I'm into cars, isn't it a way to link a category?

I'm having the webshop setup after carmodel.
example
audi
alfa romeo
bmw
chevrolet
dodge
ford

etc etc.

and in every carmodel category, I wan't to have a category called brakes.
and in brakes category i will have exactly the same products.
the products i will have under brakes is 975 products.

so instead of making xx amount of brakes categories, and linking 975 products under every brakes category under every car, it would be easier to set up 1 brakes category as wanted and link the actual brakes category under all the carmodels.

and whoosh it would be done in matter of minutes instead of linking 975 products many many many times :o)

so my question is
can this be done? hope for good news

[Absolute]

The easy answer is unfortunately no, but with a little custom coding, and knowledge of PHP, the answer could be YES!

Basically, the products are linked to a number of categories, as they are all pulled from the products_to_categories table, where there is just a list of products, and a single entry for each category you would find them in. So if you have 100 products, and 5 categories, and each product is in each category, you would have 500 records in this table.

You would need to have the same thing coded in for your store, so that each time it tried to display the categories, rather than grabbing them using the category.parent_id field, it used your new database table.

The downside to this is there are a fairl few places you would have to update, as well as create something in the admin so that you could duplicate the categories easily.

Good luck,

Absolute

[dedj]

nice.
I know a friend that knows php pretty good.
But as you said, the downside to make it easy doable over and over again when you need to duplicate a category.

This should definately be a suggestion to coming zencart version upgrades

thanks
Dejan