grouping categories, using subcategories or filter on attributes

quite new to zencart and doing my first shop...
i want to sell paintings having artist (manufacturer) and attributes (exhibition, year, size, technique).

as pointed in the subject of this thread i want to find out which method will work best for me as i want to do the following to present the products:

there are main categories like

• paintings for sale
• paintings for rent
• current exhibition
• previous exhibitions

can a painting be part of more than one category?

maybe depending on the selected category i want to provide a filter by manufacturer. is that possible to display only options of manufacturers related to products in the selected category? or will a manufacturer selection always contain every manufacturer found in my shop?

i have just found out in another thread that there is no or just hardly a chance to do filters based on real attributes.
but my customers should be able to select a painting by attribute (ie. somebody wants to buy a large painting). the attribute "size" could be used as real attribute to products or i could do subcategories from the size options (large, medium, small).
just for your understanding please note: a painting is not provided in several sizes but has only ONE size. so the customer can not chose the size of a selected product.

so i decided to use this attribute as category. but would i do subcategories or maybe use the size options as further main categories? what is recommended?

• current exhibition
• previous exhibitions
• small paintings
• large paintings

or

• current exhibition
  • small paintings
  • large paintings
• previous exhibitions
  • small paintings
  • large paintings

depending on this i then need to find out how:

• either to separate main categories from sub categories as i wanted the main cats to be displayed at the top of the page and related sub categories in the left column
• or to group main categories and separate by group as i'd like some group of categories to be displayed at the top of the page and others in the left column.

what is preferred and what is possible in zencart?

can you help me out of this situation? i could explain more if the situation was not clear yet. thanks in advance.

Individual products can be linked to any number of categories.

The manufacturer filter operates on the mfrs associated with the current category. There may be further settings for this - I haven't checked yet.

Attributes are generally intended for making choices while purchasing a product. They would not be the best way for you to present your paintings. You can make top categories of

• paintings for sale
• paintings for rent
• current exhibition
• previous exhibitions
• year
• size
• technique
• artist (f you wish)
• etc.

and link each painting into whatever categories or subs are appropriate.
You will have to decide what is the best way to categorize things.

For your category display options, I can give a number of suggestions. Activating the Categories-Tabs menu in Configuration > Layout Settings will give all of the top cats across the bottom of the header, and there is an active-category-only display mod that I just revisited here. Let me know what you think, and I can give more advice as needed.

gjh42:

Individual products can be linked to any number of categories.

how to create "individual products" ?
i can add new product into one selected category. i can not find an add-new-product-button elsewhere than inside of a selected category. but i want my products to appear in several categories. any hints?

Yes, you create a product within one category(which becomes the "master category" for that product); you can copy that product into as many other categories as you want. Look at the category/product listing in admin > Catalog > Category/Product > your category, and click the "c" for copy on the right. Select the new category, copy/link, and confirm. You can also go from there to the Multiple Category Links Manager if you want.

ok, i'll try that... so "copy" actually does not create a copy of the products record but creates another relation between product and category?
then when i edit the product in either one or another related category the changes will affect this product in all categories. i do not need to edit the product with all its copies but i edit just the one original product. is that right?

maybe there should be another term than "copy" or an additional description for that behavior of copy. i will not know if i wouldn't have asked.

There is copy/link which creates a relation between a product and a category, and copy/duplicate, which creates a new product in the new category.

A linked product edited anywhere will change in all categories.

thank you. i just tried and it works.
but i still need to get some experience with this multiple category links manager.

as i see in your signature you have some more knowledge about styling and managing categories. i don't want to display a complete category tree but i want the main categories in my header and the subcategories of a selected main category in the left layout column.
what script will be the best to start learning about category functions? i can surely separate the neccessary lines of code for my purpose. will the sideboxes/categories.php do?

See the Only shoe current category subcategories thread for the basics of this. Also Nonstandard 2 category 3 subcategory navigation designand its continuation Coding css changes into 2 category 3 subcategory tpl_categories.php for another version of the idea.

When you link a product to more than one category and a search engine crawls your site, will it think you have duplicate content?

Hello
How can i let the catigories link, when some one clicks on it a seb menu opens with a list of the products names??? that would be so great, appreciate your help.