How to add custom attributes as top navigation menu items?

[Hey Joe]

Hi,

I am trying to categorize my products by different attributes for easy cross-match layered navigation. Example:

• (category) shoes, clothes... // i have these categories already
• (color): red, black... // attribute
• (material): leather, fabric... // attribute
• etc.

Achieving this by creating categories only for the attributes is not helpful as it seems Magento cannot cross-match 2 different categories. Also repeating the same properties as a subcategory for each item is not a good option for this store in particular (e.g. Shoes/red, Shoes/black, T-shirt/red, T-shirt/black etc) . So I am looking for a way to give the customer the ability to browse not only by category but also by attributes and cross match those at any time. Example: start by material Leather and then cross-match it with color Red in layered navigation.

So instead of having the default menu structure:

Cat1 Cat2 Cat3 ... (with subcategories)

I want to have a top menu like:

Browse by: Category Attr1 Attr2 Attr3

Where hovering Category will unfold the subcategories and AttrN will unfold the used values for the custom attribute.

This will also help to avoid the current problem of having too many root-level categories (resulting in multi-line top menu).

How can I achieve this?

[hassanmurad]

were you able to do it?

I am trying to do something similar?

[Pronto]

I stronly recommend to reconsider this approach. There are things like layered navigation, search, sorting, third party extensions and whatnot to be taken into account. Basically you're over your head in no time if your try to implement it. Instead you should mirror those attributes as categories.