Using Attributes to create Woo Product Categories

TL/DR We are looking for a way to extend product categories, so that they accept both categories and attibutes as input. Everything else should remain the same.

Hi All,
for a planned WooCommerce store we organize products by brands, categories and maybe a handful of Tag. This already gives us quite a bit of flexibility – yet we would also to use a custom type of product-category. It in contrast to the default implementation should not only accept other categories as input, but also product attributes. The underlying idea is to only use the broadest, most generic product types (shoes, pants…) as categories, while gender, and any sort of product details all are attributes.

One therefore could combine shoe (=category) with ladies, black (=attributes) to Black Ladies Shoes. We are aware, that one can use Shortcodes to perform a custom database query for the desired categories and attributes. This definitely works– but resulting pseudo-category pages have no idea what range of product-portfolio they do display. This turns out as a mayor disadvantage for Authors, who want to keep perfect track of the inventory in the backend. They want to inspect the complete site hierarchy in one consolidated view, sort products inside categories manually and fix possible wrong category assignments on the fly. This does not work with clueless Shortcodes, which only request data from the database, but don’t write.

The ideal solution for us would be an extension to the categories concept that makes attributes valid input for new categories, but otherwisely perfectly sticks to the default scheme of categories, attributes and products. Here’s a quick mockup-image (imgur). Does anyone know of such an extension or has some ideas to share?

PS: We will use Product filters for that site too, but I’m referring to still quite broad product archives which deserve proper, physical categories.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by H&S-Team.