Looking for a Solution to attributes. Opinions needed...BADLY

Hi

I have been using Zen for my tshirt stores for about 3 years now.....and am very happy with it.....but I am building a new store with many more products and am a little stuck now. All along I have just been selling t-shirts as a style of shirt and putting in attributes for size and color for the customer and for years this has worked great....BUT here is my issue now. I want to add a "Style" attribute and thats easy enough...but i quickly realized that for example lets say I offer tshirts in Red,white and Blue and I put those options in the "Color" attribute....but NOW I have a Style attribute and the customer picks Sweatshirt for example....and sweatshirt is only available in black or gray. The problems arises because now in my color attribute box i have also red,white,blue cause that is what I offer in tshirts so I can run into problems cause a customer can select RED Sweatshirt which I dont offer.

I realize this is because zen does not do attribute validation. I have looked and am having no luck finding a programmer to do this for me. What I am asking is if someone can give me a useable idea that will work for me and be simple for the customer to understand as well. Is it possible to use images? or something? Any ideas you guys may be able to give me would be GREATLY appreciated cause I am really stuck and want to get this store online.

Thanks

Matt

I was having a similar problem where I was selling different color skirts and I needed to keep track of the stock of each color and size combination so that "black" was not an option for the size "small" but it was in the "medium" and
"large". To solve this problem I downloaded a stock by attribute contribution by Kurio and although my store isn't up and runnning yet so far it seems to work for me. I hink that might also work for you. Scroll through the thread till you find the most updated version and you might want to glance through some of the posts as they describe more clearly how this can be used. Hope this helps.

Personally, I'd put the sweatshirts in their own category with a mutual link to the t-shirts, and vice versa.

Some folks may be looking for just sweatshirts, or looking just for t-shirts. This would solve the item attributes issue as well as the stock issue.