Requesting Suggestions for Product Setups and Necessary Mods

[Noernberg]

I am seeking advice as to how to setup up products for a particularly complicated series of demands. I don't sell cars, but I think that makes a very good representative example that everyone can relate to. I am still using v1.5.1 of ZenCart; PHP 5.2.17 ; mySQL 5.6.41-84.1.

I would like the ability have inventory of discrete (serialized) items, but with attributes that can be dynamically searched. So imagine I have a bunch of cars.

You can have cars that are new vs. used
You can have different Makes, different Models
You can have a variety of price ranges (part of search)
You can have a general condition: (e.g. Poor / Fair / Average / Good / Superb)
You can have text unique to each individual car that gives details about that particular VIN number
I need a series of images for each individual car so the buyer can see the details about the exact item for sale.

So, I want people to be able to window shop and browse my virtual lot, stopping to read the sticker and getting the details stored in the attributes. Or I would like them to be able to dynamically filter, such as show me all vehicles that are in Average condition (or better) and less than $20,000. Anything matching that in inventory would then be viewable to peruse. Then if that lists has too many to look at and I only want to see Fords, I can add a filter by model to refine the search.

To date, I have been listing each individual "car" as it's own product, filed in multi-tiered category list. I have played with attributes, but I have not been able to make them dynamically searchable (with dropdowns). And ultimately I would like to be able to navigate to "Make and Model" via categories, but then see all fitting items in inventory from that screen, and narrow it down by the dynamic selection (or weed out things I don't want to see).

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Noernberg]

I would delete post if I could, but I ended up loading the Dynamic Filter mod and so far so good. Now to see if I can update products with Easy Populate or not...

[mc12345678]

I would delete post if I could, but I ended up loading the Dynamic Filter mod and so far so good. Now to see if I can update products with Easy Populate or not...

Although in 6 years you've now accumulated a total of four posts, this thread is exactly as it should be: problem basically specifically described. A solution for part of the answer self described. Hopefully when/if you have answered the remaining part of your question(s) you will provide the details of that as well. Basically, there's no reason that the first post would have needed to be deleted.