Making a Commerce site sortable in different ways.

I am working on an e-commerce site for a client that is designed to sell works of art. Each painting (etc.) has various specific pieces of information attached to it, such as the artist name, cost, media (painting, figurine, sketch, etc.), size, weight, and description. I am looking for the best way to set up a system within WordPress for managing the individual sale items, perhaps as posts that can be deleted as the unique works are sold.

Basically, I was trying to wrap my mind around the best way to connect all the information about the work to the post that would represent that work. I thought about using categories for the artist, tags for subject matter/general descriptions (red, silver, forest, pastoral, etc.), and then using Custom fields to attach other information types.

I’m wanting something similar to how the WordPress plugin repository works. Anyone have any information on that?

I’m sure that I could dig around in the Codex for enough information, and then figure out a bailing-wire-and-duct-tape way to piece the site together and then refine it over time, but I wanted to know if anyone has tried this kind of thing before, what tricks they used, which plugins work well, where they went for resources, and how it turned out in the end.

I don’t have a lot of time to figure this out, so any input would be much appreciated whilst I’m experimenting on my end 🙂

Thanks all,
MindBlender 3D

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