extending product fields for a book catalog?

[mda]

Just installed oscommerce.

 

It appears there is support for product "attributes" aka "options", which

are things that the user can select to distinguish different product

variants.

 

That isn't what i'm interested in.

 

Rather, I'd like structured (database-driven) support for product

aspects, such as "author" or "number_pages" for a book.

Those are fixed values per product; they aren't selectable sku

variants.

 

but i'm looking at products_new.php and all its inline'd sql expressions

with a hardcoded set of product fields, and I'm thinking this will never

happen?

 

there are lots of matches to searches for "attributes" and "fields"

among contributions, but the first several i looked at either had

no useful description, or didn't do this.

 

thanks for any guidance. i can't believe i'm the first to confront this.

maybe there is a way to get the product "options" to do this, with

only a single value per product. but the user display would

still have to be changed. And hopefully the admin page would

be more convenient.

 

thanks....

 

-mda