Same subcategories but different top category... possible?

[Peraklo]

v2.0.22b

Lets say i have subcategories hard drives, graphic cards, CPUs and approx 100 more categories.

i would like to have top categories which are cities, NEW YORK, LA, CHICAGO, etc

do i have to create all those 100 subcategories for each city or can i somehow use the same subcategories but with different top one. offcourse, if i am in the different top category, all the items from other ones should be invisible in the front end (dont want to see CPUs from Chikago if im in LA, but CPUs from all cities are still in the same category).

There is a logical upsidedown approach, where CPU and other are TOP categories, but that would still require creation of city subcategories for each and every one of them.

I hope you get my question and i sure hope there is a positive answer.

Thanks

[Maxim Pishnyak]

Custom fields could be useful for you.

[jenkinhill]

If you use CSVI then you can set the categories up using a spreadsheet, and copy & paste to duplicate subcats into each individual top cat.

So City1, city2 etc are  top cats
Drive, cpu etc are sub cats, copied into each top cat.

Then you upload as a csv into VM with CSVI. That's how I manage large sites.

[Peraklo]

If you use CSVI then you can set the categories up using a spreadsheet, and copy & paste to duplicate subcats into each individual top cat.

So City1, city2 etc are  top cats
Drive, cpu etc are sub cats, copied into each top cat.

Then you upload as a csv into VM with CSVI. That's how I manage large sites.

So that will work ok? Just copying the categories? will that big number of categories be an overkill for VM? I plan on having approx 10.000 items, but so many categories seems a lot.

Like Maxim mentioned, can i solve this via custom fields? so i just have hard drive 1, and it has custom fields like Country, City, etc. And added to that, can i create custom view then on store homepage, that says COUNTRY and below there is everytthing that has that country in it. I would really love it if i had only a few categories (HDD, CPU, MBO) and all organization is managed through custom fields and maybe a VM plugin for custom filtering.

[jenkinhill]

I prefer to use categories to make it easier to drill down to products, eg using custom filters such as http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=100913.0  You can also filter by custom field, but I have generally found custom fields not so easy to work with. VM does provide different ways to achieve the same result. As long as the structure gives each customer a simple & quick way to locate the product they want to purchase.

[Peraklo]

I like the CSVI idea and categories more than custom fields, feels more Joomla like...

still, not sure if there is a theoretical or practical limit on the number of categories? Is there a point where VM will start to lag or something... My PHP memory limit on server is 128 MB.

[jenkinhill]

I think 128Mb is just on the limit for Joomla 2.5 to run smoothly and quickly. I noticed a small speed improvement on a big J2.5 site running community builder when memory was upped from 128 to 256Mb, but when dropped to 64Mb it was painfully slow.

I'm not aware of a category limit.

[balai]

Btw. You can insert custom fields and generate custom filters also using CSVI

In my point of view it will be hard for your users, to drill down an enormous multi-level categories menu, to find what they are looking for.

I think its much more user friendly to first select a city and then use other filters with other options to specify their search.
Simple and faster for your users

[some]

All that you suggest are workarround, but no the solution.
What is needed is a category filter, but not only hierarchy from the top category.
What is needed is filter, that you can select from diferent category are they nested or not.

At level "category". Suggestion like custom fields are not valid. Please think about.

The hierarchy must be combined from diferent start level. Maybe 2,3 or more start level, depend of what one need. In the case of this thread is needed from 2 diferent category doing hierarchy filtering and combine the results.

There is no free or comercial component that do that at today.

[balai]

All that you suggest are workarround, but no the solution.
What is needed is a category filter, but not only hierarchy from the top category.
What is needed is filter, that you can select from diferent category are they nested or not.

At level "category". Suggestion like custom fields are not valid. Please think about.

The hierarchy must be combined from diferent start level. Maybe 2,3 or more start level, depend of what one need. In the case of this thread is needed from 2 diferent category doing hierarchy filtering and combine the results.

There is no free or comercial component that do that at today.

I am not sure that i am getting your point.
You mean that you want to have multiple category filters each one containing a different set of categories?