Making Products Model a dropdown option in admin

[Joseph M]

Is there a way to make Products Model a dropdown menu in the admin area. I want to use it for another field which has only about a dozen options.

[fairestcape]

Changing the purpose and function of this field may affect other operations. For one, you will not be able to use Easy Populate...

You may be better off adding a custom field, and there are lots of posts on that subject in the forum.

[Joseph M]

Changing the purpose and function of this field may affect other operations. For one, you will not be able to use Easy Populate...

You may be better off adding a custom field, and there are lots of posts on that subject in the forum.

But the only function change would be the dropdown menu in the admin. The actual values wouldn't be much different than an actual product model or number, so I figured it would be just as easy for ZC to search. It would only be a field name change from the store view. And from what I understand setting up a custom field would change the core code, so I'd always have to be careful of that when making program updates.
Isn't that correct? Sorry, but I'm really new to this and just learning as I go.
Thank you.

[fairestcape]

I'm not sure what you want to achieve here.

Every product has a UNIQUE model number (or ought to) as its based on the retail principle of Stock Keeping Units (SKU). In essence, the SKU is commonly an AlphaNumeric coding system that both categorises stock, and gives unique items a unique reference.

If you have 20,000 products in your store, EACH ONE ought to have a unique SKU (or Model Number)...

... you could theoretically end up with a dropdown that is 20,000 lines deep:

[Joseph M]

I'm not sure what you want to achieve here.

Every product has a UNIQUE model number (or ought to) as its based on the retail principle of Stock Keeping Units (SKU). In essence, the SKU is commonly an AlphaNumeric coding system that both categorises stock, and gives unique items a unique reference.

If you have 20,000 products in your store, EACH ONE ought to have a unique SKU (or Model Number)...

... you could theoretically end up with a dropdown that is 20,000 lines deep:

What I want is to be able to search for 'all CDs' or 'all LPs' or 'all posters' (the media format) within the entire population of products. Currently I have to create a category for each format and link each product to that second category. So what I really want to do is give the product the label in the product creation page in the admin and avoid the second step of having to link it.
In this case my dropdown menu would contain only about a dozen values.

It actually would be ideal to create a custom field for this as you suggest. But I believe that's a much more complicated procedure which requires changing the core code.

Another option I've considered is using the "Media Type" (actually that would serve me perfectly). But I don't know how to make that show up in admin when defining a music product. And I'm really not sure how to call a search on it.