Creating a module with exact replica of the Manage Attributes

Question

I'm planning to create a manufacturer module wherein I can add Manufacturer and choose products that they manufacture from the Products added (Product List) in the store. And display Manufacturer on frontend listing the Products they manufacture from my Store.
But first and foremost I want to know how to clone the "Manage Attributes" of Magento for this will be my starting ground. Can anyone here guide, help or walk me through on it? Or someone can provide link on how to achieve such?

Looking forward to hear from the experts.

Answer 1

I have exactly what you need.
There is a free extension that will generate (almost) the full code you need.
Give this a try..
Full documentation on how to use can be found here.
This extension allows you to create other modules more or less in a similar way you create a table using phpMyAdmin.
You can create your extension with an entity called manufacturer in your case, and state that this entity behaves as EAV.
And you should link your entity in a "many to many" relation with your products.
Doing this, you will be able to manage the attributes of your manufacturer instances like you do for products. It even allows you file and image attributes.
And you will be able to select the associated products linked to your manufacturer and display them in the frontend.
The only thing that it does not do, it display them paginated on frontend. But you can work on that.