I'm trying to create a catalog with Magento that will list a lot of products which are made of different materials (over 15000 accross the entire catalogue) but they can be grouped like
metal -> iron, steel, copper, zinc, aluminum etc
ceramic -> clay, titanium trioxide, porcelain etc
amorphus -> glass, silicon etc
So I thought of creating a multi select attribute that will be filterable via layered navigation. However I'm encountering two problems related with that.
I can create an atttibute called
material_group
with let's say 200 groups and a multi select attribute called
materials
with 15.000 materials and the following problems arise.
- In layered navigation at the catalog category page this would make magento load 15.000 materials and slow it down quite a bit as well as making the page extend way too much to the bottom so the user would scroll a lot.
- In the admin page it's going to be really hard to sort the attribute values as new values are added so when creating a new product the person that has to select the materials would have to look for them in an unsorted multi-select list of 15.000 items.
In the frontpage:
currently if a user clicks on a material_group, the layered navigation will filter the products and less materials will show up in the next filter but I would like to force magento to not load the materials attribute values until a material_group has been selected and I have no clue how to achieve that.
In the admin page:
Ideally I would want the attribute values to be filtered by the grouping attribute so that in the multi select the options would be limited.
Any ideas what I should look into to make this happen? Or do you know of a magento extension that will allow parent/child relationship between attributes?
