Display by attributes - How do I do it?

Hi, I'm a pretty new user to Zen Cart, and although I figured out how to give attributes to items, and got them showing up the way I want to, I can't quite figure out how to sort/filter by attributes.

What I'm doing is creating an art sale website. I work for a couple of large art galleries in Sacramento, CA, and we want to put some of our "older" pieces "on sale", and we have a pretty wide range of art mountings. Some are paper under glass, some are unmounted paper, some are stretched canvas, sometimes framed, sometimes unframed, and some are rolled canvas. I want to be able to sort by those criteria, and still have the art be under the correct categories (Sacramento art, vineyard art, by artist, etc etc).

Is there a way to filter down the attributes from, say, all Sacramento art to find just the pieces we have available on stretched canvas, unframed? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.
Lou

Unfortunately, no, this is not currently possible. It is theoretically possible, and someone may even have done it - look around Downloads and see.

LouAllen:

Hi, I'm a pretty new user to Zen Cart, and although I figured out how to give attributes to items, and got them showing up the way I want to, I can't quite figure out how to sort/filter by attributes.

What I'm doing is creating an art sale website. I work for a couple of large art galleries in Sacramento, CA, and we want to put some of our "older" pieces "on sale", and we have a pretty wide range of art mountings. Some are paper under glass, some are unmounted paper, some are stretched canvas, sometimes framed, sometimes unframed, and some are rolled canvas. I want to be able to sort by those criteria, and still have the art be under the correct categories (Sacramento art, vineyard art, by artist, etc etc).

Is there a way to filter down the attributes from, say, all Sacramento art to find just the pieces we have available on stretched canvas, unframed? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.
Lou

You could acheive this with categories and subcategories. Not an ideal solution but it might be worth considering until you find a better solution.

ie. you could create another category called "Sacramento" and link all the products from your current categories that fit that criteria. This category could then have subcategories for "Artist", then the Artist category could contain subcategories for "Framed", "Unframed" etc.

spbennett:

You could acheive this with categories and subcategories. Not an ideal solution but it might be worth considering until you find a better solution.

ie. you could create another category called "Sacramento" and link all the products from your current categories that fit that criteria. This category could then have subcategories for "Artist", then the Artist category could contain subcategories for "Framed", "Unframed" etc.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking I'd have to do, since I'm really not a php/mysql guru. Is there a way of deciding where the categories show up in the sidebar lists and the header navbar, so these secondary categories aren't showing up EVERYWHERE with the others?

Yes, I worked out some code to do this a few months ago. It is in the Parent Categories Separated In 3 sideboxes thread.
It could be adapted for other locations I'm sure.