Category Layout Advice Please :)

[YoyoLuke]

Hi all,

 

I am hoping someone might be able to advise me on the best way to accomplish my current issue that I am having.

 

Say I have a shop that sells a variety of different things, one of them being cereals.

 

I want my users to be able to choose Cereals as an option to browse, so I create a new category (funnily enough) called Cereals.

 

As a sub category to this, I want to break the cereals down into Brands - so I create the following Sub Categories to Cereals, so the layout looks like this:

 

Cereals

- Kelloggs

- Nestlé

- Quaker Oats

- Own Brand

 

I then as further sub categories list out some of the products in each category

 

Cereals

-Kelloggs

     * Rice Krispies

     * Frosties

     * Special K

-Nestlé

     *Nesquik

     *Cochapic

-Quaker Oats

     *Original Porridge

     *ReadyBrek

     *Oatmeal

-Own Brand

     *Crunchy Flakes

 

 

All well and good.

 

As an attribute to each cereal, I want to give them the attribute of 'Healthy', so in my mind, I need to create a sub category of cereals, and then in the back end under 'Associations' I add that link to the healthy category as follows (I have put a (H) next to each cereal I have linked to the Healthy category:

 

 

Cereals

-Healthy

-Kelloggs

     * Rice Krispies

     * Frosties

     * Special K (H)

-Nestlé

     *Nesquik

     *Cochapic

-Quaker Oats

     *Original Porridge (H)

     *ReadyBrek

     *Oatmeal (H)

-Own Brand

     *Crunchy Flakes

 

This way - I can put Healthy as a link on the main menu bar, and people will click it and it will display the following:

 

-Healthy

     *Special K

     *Original Porridge

     *Oatmeal

 

My Problem is - when people click on Healthy, I want them to be able to browse by brand if they wish (and not just have a list of all the cereals) so the tree would look something like this again:

 

Healthy

-Kelloggs

     * Special K (H)

-Quaker Oats

     *Original Porridge (H)

     *Oatmeal (H)

 

This is where I am stuck. I guess I could create another sub category to healthy (much like I did with cereals) and list ALL the brands again, and then in the associations for each product simply link - for example - Special K to both the Kelloggs section under Cereals and the Kelloggs section under healthy.... but that seems like a lot of extra work (especially if I already have these products in place),

 

If anyone has been able to follow this far - does anyone have any recommendations? Is there any detailed filtering I can do that I have missed?

 

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

 

Many thanks

 

Luke

 

[BarryH]

I think your approach is the most straight-forward one. Basically, categories are characteristics and you associate single products with whatever categories/subcategories as appropriate. You're not duplicating products, just adding associations.

 

On the other hand, you're really talking about two different things: categories and menu entries. I can imagine that it might be possible to dynamically change what categories are displayed on the menu to match the conditions of the browsing situation but I wouldn't have the first idea on how to implement something like that.