How to set up two types of color swatches

Question

Does it allow you to have color swatch for selecting product variants and separate one for filtering search results.

We would like to use two types of color swatches on our Magento site.

1. One on the product details page for selecting product variants i.e. configurable products.
2. And another on the product listings pages for filtering through the catalog pages.

They need to be different as we have dozens & dozens of different colour variants across all our different brands and rather than show all these colours in the filtered navigation we would like to only show 10 to 15.

Is there a way to configure this in Magento or do you need a custom extension for this?

Answer 1

Ok so this was really simple in the end.

I created a second color attribute search_color but I made it's input type Multiple Select and therefore it is not used in making configurable products. I set it to be used in Layered Navigation but not to be Visible on Product View Page on Front-end.

I changed the configurable color attribute not to be used In Layered Navigation.

The only thing is I have a list of colors in my layered navigation rather than swatches but I think I can easily correct this with css.