AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

New AC user and I'm not sure of all the terminology so please help.

We would like to have two top level categories: Product Type and Manufacturer. Each manufacturer will have subcategories which we'd like to duplicate in the Product Type category.

For example:
Manufacturers

Alice's Apparel
Shirts
Dresses
Slacks

Sams Slacks
Shirts
Slacks

Product Type
Shirts
Slacks

We'd like to enter all the products in the manufacturer's category tree then copy them into the Type categories.

My questions:

1) Is there anyway to 'link' or reference a given product to multiple categories such that edits to a single instance (price change for example) are reflected in all instances of the item. In Oscommerce and Zen Cart this is the Link feature. Is there an equivalent in AbleCommerce?

2)Can the content of an entire category be copied (or linked) into another or must the individual product items be copied one at a time?

Thanks!

1) Is there anyway to 'link' or reference a given product to multiple categories such that edits to a single instance (price change for example) are reflected in all instances of the item. In Oscommerce and Zen Cart this is the Link feature. Is there an equivalent in AbleCommerce?

Yes this is possible, a product can be linked to multiple categories.

2)Can the content of an entire category be copied (or linked) into another or must the individual product items be copied one at a time?

Currently AbleCommerce doesn't expose this functionality, but this is doable easily. You can customize the catalog to support this functionality.

New AC user and I'm not sure of all the terminology so please help.

We would like to have two top level categories: Product Type and Manufacturer. Each manufacturer will have subcategories which we'd like to duplicate in the Product Type category.

For example:
Manufacturers

Alice's Apparel
Shirts
Dresses
Slacks

Sams Slacks
Shirts
Slacks

Product Type
Shirts
Slacks

We'd like to enter all the products in the manufacturer's category tree then copy them into the Type categories.

I think you asked both questions 1 and 2 in order to solve this problem. This is not the solution. In fact there is no need adopt this type of difficult solution to for this problem. AbleCommerce provides the support to associate products with manufacturers, so all you need is to create two categories Shirts and Slacks and enter products for these both categories and specify the manufacturer for each product. When you are done with this job no you need to adjust the navigation in such a way that customer can either browse by category or by manufacture. For category navigation there is already a control in ConLib named SimpleCategoryList and for manufacture listing there is another control available here.
viewtopic.php?f=47&t=9343
So all you need to do is to modify the left side bar navigation and put the manufacturer listing control in it and then create a new page for manufacture display and use the manufacturer display control in that page and it will work. Please check the following screen shot.

I just updated the following thread and last attachment contains all files required to for manufactuere listing so you can install them in same order in which they are in package.
The next thing you will need to do is to modify the Standard sidebar 1 scritplet and update it as below Just FYI please check the Product Finder control, its already doing almost a similar job for product finder.