Create Departments for Your Products
You may want to create different departments for your products.
There are two easy ways that you can do this. Create a departments weblog, or use straightforward categories.
If you create categories for departments, deal with the categories in the standard way.
If you decide to use a weblog specifically to store your departments (or manufacturers, etc) you will need to add a “relationship” field to your products weblog to connect these departments to products in your store. You can use a standard EE relationship field, a Playa field (see http://pixelandtonic.com to purchase playa) or use an MD Simple Relation field (available at http://devot-ee.com) to associate your departments with your products.
{examples_channel_configuration} {/examples_channel_configuration}I personally find categories more difficult to use than a standard weblog, so I prefer to store all data in weblogs where possible. We often use the related weblog technique to store information like manufacturer, color, material, and other shared data. It makes it easy to pull data using related_entries and reverse_related_entries tags (please see the ExpressionEngine documentation for more detail on using related, and reverse related data.
