Need Help Creating A "filter" On My Site

[Guest]

I found this contribution: http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,2634 but I need to modify it somewhat and need some advice as to where I might could start.

 

What I have is a site that sells parts for vehicles. We do use the manufacturers filter box on the category pages, but I'm tyring to create another "filter" that will allow me to pull up a category with different vehicle types in it and display only one, if I need to.

 

Unlike manufacturers, some of these items will fit more than one vehicle, so I can't include the vehicle type field in the products table. I have created two new tables in my database - one which defines the different vehicle types and another called "products_to_vehicles" where I define a relationship between a product and the different vehicle it will fit.

 

Now, I would like to create a hard-coded SEO page that will basically be links to categories that contain the products for that vehicle. I will be hard coding the links to those categories, so I don't need to filter those dynamically, only the items shown in that category when I link to it.

 

For example, if I create a Mustang SEO page and I link to our engine parts category (which contains parts for multiple vehicles), I would like to make only the Mustang parts display.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions for me?

[Guest]

Anyone?

[Guest]

Let me rephrase my question... I can think this through somewhat logically, but don't know how to make it happen...

 

 

I have created two new tables in my database: Vehicle Type (Ford, Chevy, Toyota, etc.) and products to vehicle (products_id fits a chevy and products_id fits a ford).

 

I'm wondering if someone can tell me where I am supposed to tell the index page to load the information from the new tables when it opens, but not necessarily display it anywhere on the page. I assume that I need to do this because, from another page, I would like to create links to categories such as "transmissions" and be able to display ONLY Ford or ONLY Chevy. I had to create the new tables because some items might fit both Ford and Chevy, or all vehicles.

 

I don't know if maybe the URL would be the best way to execute that filter. If yes, it probably should look SOMETHING like the manufacturer filter does... www.mystore.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=16&sort=5a&filter_id=32.

 

Hopefully rewording this might spark an idea... I would be thankful for any assistance.

[Colin]

It's a little more complicated than that. Sorry.

 

I've done it on a couple of customer's sites. Big job.