Filter by Categories or New Product type?

[millo_magno]

Hi,

I have a site where I'll be selling fabric along with clothes. I've considered creating a new product type for fabric because of the fact that it's sold in fractional quantities, I haven't done so yet because it doesn't look like creating a new product type is an easy task and not sure if it's worth it just yet. Below however I've listed two more reasons as to why it might actually be necessary. I'm hoping someone could offer some advice.

1. In the shopping cart on the RHS column. I've removed the 'ea' that appears next to the items because of the fact that this wouldn't work with fabric. What I need to do is have an 'm' for metres display next to the quantity of the fabric items however I only need the 'm' to appear for fabric items and not clothing items. Now if I'm not able to distinguish by product type, is there any way that I can get this to appear just for items within a particular category ('fabric' category for example)?

2. I need to modify the file 'tpl_tabular_display.php' however if I modify this it will change the layout for all items that appear with any category. Is there a way that I can have various layouts dependent on what category they belong to?

What I'd be interested to know is whether it would be easier to do this by having fabrics as a seperate product type or whether I can simply filter by categories that I've created and therefore affect output via that method.

Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

[Ajeh]

This would take some customizing ...

Currently there is not an unit of measure feature on quantity to manage various types ...

[millo_magno]

Hi Ajeh,

Thanks for responding.

So is there no way that maybe I could just hack the code so that I can check whatever category the product belongs to and filter the output by doing something like ...

if category == fabric {
do this
} else {
do that
}

of course i don't know what the best way to get the top level category value from the product? do you know?