Looking for a way to extend attributes

Question

I'm looking for a way to effectively extend attribute options.

The scenario is this. I have a brand attribute, and this attribute holds many attributes options (Brand1, Brand2, etc). What I'd like is to be able to store some extra information about those values, for example, for each brand I'd like some text maybe entitled "about the brand", maybe even an option to upload an image for the brand.

Now, I know there are various "Brand" extensions knocking around, but I'd like to use this functionality for other attributes (material, wattage, etc).

So I guess what I'm looking for is a way of making attributes of attributes.

Does anyone know of a way of achieving this?

Answer 1

To achieve what you need you must create attributes with a custom source model. See a small explanation of how you can do that in here.
The example shows how do to it with hard-coded values, but you can change that to read the values from a custom table by changing the method getAllOptions.
In order to manage those values in the source table you can create a simple CRUD module.