New to using 'Manufacturers' but I need sub categories within the manufacturer's pages.

One manufacturer has too many items - I want to break up and have the page behave more like a categories page.
When the user clicks on 'Manufacturer_A' link, have it pull up additional categories:

Manufacturer_A -> Category_1
Manufacturer_A -> Category_2
Manufacturer_A -> Category_3
etc.

Then when user clicks on Category_1 - pull up items linked to category_1,
when user clicks on Category_2 - pull up items linked to category_2,
and so on...

Is there any way to do this?

It almost looks like the hooks are there. Looking at the categories admin page, there is a drop down that I never noticed before. Seems the only selection for this one is "Category Inventory". Maybe a "Category Manufacturer" was in the works? If not, what is this section for?

Hi there
Really I think the assumption has always been that there is only ever one manufacturer and it’s not very logical that there are two manufacturers making the same item. Manufacturers are treated in a different way as it is the principal product attribute, but at the end of the day they are just product attributes so if you wanted as sub manufacturer, would creating another attribute class to assign to these sub manufacturer products be the way to go?

Vince

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Trying to clarify... but how do I upload an image into the conversation?
Using "Insert Image" only adds place where it will be inserted into text but does not allow an image upload.

I can straighten out my manufacturer stuff by treating them as categories instead of manufacturers but -
How do I create a category that does not get shown in website's categories page yet I can still manually link to the category and show the entries within it? A hidden category that can still be displayed using hard URLs such as www.mywebsite.com/Manufacturer_A.asp
The underlying code to this page would be a hardcoded version of categories.asp - that is do-able.
The hard part is hiding a category or multiple categories, how do I do that?

Hi, to attach an image to your post, the image must be hosted somewhere. The easiest is to probably put it on your server where your website is.
Then you just put the path to that image in the post here, wrapped in the IMG tags.
(Without the spaces in the i m g)
[i m g]http://www.somewebsite.com/images/someimage.jpg[/i m g]

Thanks,
David

I tried that. But I have hotlinking disabled. If the image isn't linked from within my website, it cannot be brought up. I prefer to keep it that way due to one of my competitors.

What I was planning on doing.
1 - Create a category named "Products" which is linked to "Home Category"
2 - Assign this to be root by ticking the box "Check to make this category the product catalog root".
3 - Assign all the various customer browse-able product categories to this "Products" category.
4 - create category named "Manufacturers" which is linked to "Home Category"
5 - Add sub categories to these manufacturers
6 - Link components (already existing under "Products" subcategories) to the manufacturer subcategories.
7 - Create my own manufacturers page which lists the manufacturers with links to their categories and subcategories.

All this while the Manufacturers pages are not seen in the normal product categories.

Somewhat similar to what is seen in "Top Section Deleted" discussion dated 8 August 2020. See last post in that thread. If the bug mentioned in this thread still exists then this obviously won't work.

https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/support/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=113096

Hi ekrzycki
I see what you are saying, but really it's not 100% clear that that is a bug to be fixed (the Top Section Deleted issue). The idea was to allow a URL structure to be created outside of the product catalog and that way people could create all their navigation dynamically. What you're trying to do here though is declare products outside of the product catalog and that's not the intention of being able to reset the catalog root.

Vince

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OK -- Is there anyway I can create a category that:
1 - does not show up on categories page. Hidden but not disabled.
2 - I can link to that category as I can now with other enabled categories.

Hi ekrzycki
I'm really sorry but I don't think there is. There is a mechanism for hiding categories but it's assuming you really want that category to not display.

Vince

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Summary --
You can have products listed on manufacturer's pages but you cannot link categories pages to manufacturer's pages.
That won't work for me when I have manufacturer's with either a lot of products or groups of radically different products and you want to categorize the products.

My solution is to create a manufacturers page that has subcategories assigned to some of the manufacturers:

Add to your style.css & upload:
.hide_category{display:none;}

Create new category: "Manufacturers" linked to Home Category.
Make this new category so that you can add subcategories.
Add category url to /manufacturers.asp.
Hide the category -- Left side of categories listing page, select "Custom CSS Class" in drop down menu, assign hide_category to this new category. This will allow you to create a hidden yet accessible category where you can link subcategories.

Create new categories for each manufacturer as required.
Link these categories to your new "Manufacturers" category.
Create new sub categories for each manufacturer as required and link to the individual manufacturers.

Create and upload new manufacturers.asp page copied from categories.asp as instructed by ECT.

Create new static web page for each manufacturer you want specified in the top 'Manufacturers" category. I do this so that each individual manufacturer have their own customized page title such as www.mywebsite.com/manufacturername.asp.
Each manufacturer's page can be made from either a products.asp or categories.asp depending on whether or not you have subcategories:
If you want a manufacturer page to have sub categories - create a new page copied from categories.asp
Edit the page and define your category page contents by adding <% explicitid=210 %> (where the actual ID is your specific manufacturers categories ID)
Add this right above <!--#include file="vsadmin/inc/inccategories.asp"-->
You can use a products page for a manufacturer as well but this mostly ends up being a duplication of what the ECT page would have automatically created.

Assign actual manufacturers to your new manufacturers page:
Within modify attributes for each manufacturer -- add either:

1 - Let ECT handle the listing by leaving the static page URL blank. This will add a products type listing for that manufactuer.

2 - Link to an existing products page such as this:
/products.asp?cat=80
This allows you to copy an existing products page to keep same formatting.
Downside is this can do 'amazing' things if you rearrange your category numbering...

3 - Link to your custom category or products page such as this:
/WDC.asp or whatever your newly created manufacturer page is.

This all seems to work nicely with the ECT break crumbs, etc.
There may be better ways to do this but I haven't found one yet.
Note - none of this work is necessary if you do not use sub categories within your manufacturer's pages.