Breaking down product range (and site) into departments.

[tobes]

Hi

I'm an experienced programmer but I'm new to Prestashop, so I'm looking for a few pointers before I dive into my current project.

My client runs an extensive extreme sports shop, I've been playing round with Prestashop as a basis for his new website, and from a lot of angles it looks ideal. However one part of the structure still seems a grey area to me.

He would like to break down the site by department to avoid an overwhelming list of products and also to provide relevant static content alongside the current page (so for example, when browsing bike parts, you may have a links to a bike sizing guide, details of the workshop facilities, and other bike related pages in the side navigation area, while the surf section would have different static pages in its sidebar and only show surf related sub-categories). The only link between sections being separate top level navigation offering "Bike department", "Surf department" etc.

So I'd like a few pointers on the best way to plan this breakdown that would be most in keeping with the Prestashop ethos. For example how to go about extending the CMS to give pages a section id, how to best detect / define the section currently being viewed to restrict which offers might be displayed, etc.

Pointers to reduce the number of times I do this wrong would be greatly appreciated... ;-)

Thanks

--Toby