Hi guys, help please:

*1. My Scenario:*

I'm building a shopping cart and using Ubercart+Drupal 7. It's a cosmetics and related eCommerce site.

Manufacturers will be able to log in and create their own products with

- Product attributes {Name, SKU, price etc} - Department + Category - can be multiple - a brand

A product can exist in multiple Department/Categories too.

Sample screenshot: http://picpaste.com/pics/menu.1375842751.png :

[image: Inline images 1]

*2. Elaboration of the situation*

I'm having trouble figuring out the most correct, stable and fastest way to set up Department/Categories with the following goals and criteria:

2i. Product - CCK fields for adding Department, Categories to product:

- Select a department, and it's associated category (Dep+Cat) -

There are going to be about 12 Deps, 15 Cats each = 180 categories. I do not want to list this as an entire taxonomy dropdown - confusing and ugly. My thought right now is to have two multi-select boxes side by side - "Department" with 12 items & "Category". To illustrate, here's a simple wireframe: http://picpaste.com/Add_dept_cat.png

[image: Inline images 2] -

Manufacturers can list the product in multiple departments and categories.

2ii. Add or Create and Add brand to product - Add an existing brand to the product - If brand doesn't exist, add a new brand and add it to the product - Brands are attached to the manufacturers who created them

2iii. I'm searching and finding modules such as taxonomy_menu, taxonomy_hierarchy and content_taxonomy. However a lot of them look like they are not stable or supported for Drupal 7. Even if they are ok, I'm not sure if I'm heading in the right direction by using these modules.

2iv. Shoppers (Authenticated users) should be able to see the main menu on top which actually lists the departments available. On hovering, a particular department's categories & brands within are shown. They can click a department from the menu or drill down to category or brand. On selecting one of these three, the product listing comes up -- if department, shows department items, allowing filtering by brand/category -- if category selected, e.g "moisturisers", shows all items and allows filtering by brand --- if brand selected, shows all items for that brand in this department / category, allows you to move up and see all items for the brand in this department, and in other departments..

*3. Question*

Having said all that, my question is more to do with the CCK input fields of department, categories & brands and the underlying taxonomy / menu structures and modules. For 2iii, any tips are welcome, but I'm not at that stage yet anyways so I'm not looking at that yet.

I'm having trouble with

- how I should structure my data in taxonomies or other structures (menus?) - how to create the cck fields for the manufacturer to add multiple department / categories to his product - how he can add a brand to his product or create and add a new brand to his product

Ideally I want to achieve the above with modules in the most Drupal-correct, stable and fastest way possible, without having to write any code.

Best Regards Alex