My main goal is to have pages listting products by each brand available.
From this answer I understood that you can make it possible by serach pages.
All products have 'manufacturer' attribute. To set up search pages you need to make sure that the attrubute is available in search. Then you should be able to access all products by the brand following example.com/?manufacturer=apple
to see all apple products. Howerver, this link returns the front page.
if I use serach and enter apple it returns a page with url
http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=apple
and use the brand filter, select apple the url becomes
http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?manufacturer=285&q=apple
Next three links return back to home page, What am I missing here?
http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?manufacturer=285
http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/?manufacturer=285
http://www.example.com/?manufacturer=285
Link below returns 404 page
http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/?manufacturer=285
Are there other other ways to genertae pages with a list of products by this brands?
Please do not offer extensions.