How to display categories under a manufacturer

[RacingAddiction]

Our site is track ready products .com

I dug around quite a bit but am stuck - when the customer selects a manufacturer from the (left-column) selection box, is it possible to display the product categories within that brand?

As an example, when you choose Bilstein there's about 1700 products and it would more helpful if the categories were displayed.

Thanks!

[torvista]

> is it possible to display the product categories within that brand?

That implies you have created a category per manufacturer (as I did) ..so you want your dropdowns to refer to those categories and not by the manufacturer name assigned to a product.

The manufacturer/brand concept is limiting for the exact reason you've described....it leads to an unfiltered/unuseable bucket of all products...I have one with 7k products.

So you want a sidebox of category drop-downs.

[RacingAddiction]

Torvista,
>> That implies you have created a category per manufacturer

Ok, that stumped me - I've always considered a category to represent a range of products, not a manufacturer. How is that possible? What you did with Denali is what I had in mind.

[swguy]

I think what he really wants is dynamic filtering. Perhaps some nice person will add this to Zen Cart 2.1.

[torvista]

>Ok, that stumped me - I've always considered a category to represent a range of products, not a manufacturer. How is that possible? What you did with Denali is what I had in mind.

I decided from day one to use
1: a root category for manufacturers, where the individual products "live", that follows a logical structure as per the manufacturers families. This is the base, from which all are linked.
2: a normal product category structure, with linked products / a generic description of a product family, leading to the products in 1
3: an enormous Bike-Model-Year structure where the individual products are linked per compatibility into a year

1: is accessed through a category drop down per "manufacturer" but as a category name, not as the product manufacturer assigned in the db.
2: is accessed via normal category sidebox omitting results from 1 and 3
3: is accessed via triple dropdown

So, no use of the core "manufacturers" at all, as if you want some categorisation, you can't. Apart from filtering a product listing of mixed products.

[DannyVarley]

I think what he really wants is dynamic filtering. Perhaps some nice person will add this to Zen Cart 2.1.

I am currently looking for commercial help to update the Dynamic Filter plugin to current standards, If I manage to get any further with this I will update as I believe dynamic filtering of the product pages is sorely needed!

[lat9]

I am currently looking for commercial help to update the Dynamic Filter plugin to current standards, If I manage to get any further with this I will update as I believe dynamic filtering of the product pages is sorely needed!

FWIW, I took a look at the current Zen Cart plugin (and associated GitHub) version which was last updated for zc154. It'll take a fair amount of unraveling (since I don't have any means to install a zc154 test site) to figure out what it was doing, given the number of Zen Cart core files that were touched.

[RacingAddiction]

DannyVarley,
same here, I'm contemplating going that route (if it's possible mechanically) so perhaps we might share the cost.