Need help with some logic.

[sackling]

Hi All,

 

I have been using oscommerce as pretty much only a shopping cart for the past 3 years. using sts templates to make my html interact with the shopping cart,login pages, account pages etc.

 

in the past year I have decided to switch over to a fuller oscommerce experience. albeit still very customized from the vanilla install.

 

one of the issues I am currently facing is one of organization. I have for instance 2 different styles of pants for sale. style 127 and style 128. Both of these pants are offered in 5 different colors and are exactly the same except they have 1 difference (inseam). On my old html page I have just 1 image linking to all 5 colors, and a link on the those pages to change the inseam (clicking the other inseam would bring you to another html page entirely.

 

you can see this here: http://bit.ly/987Zon

 

on my new setup however I have the pages loading all products in each category on a page in every color. I dont mind showing each color seperatly but having 10 images that are all the same is conffusing. Ideally I would like to have just 5 images and a drop down that lets the user select which of the 2 inseams they would like to go with the size they have chosen.

 

before I go any further here is a link to my current product_info.php page: http://bit.ly/dbVQQo

 

everything on this page is loaded dynamically through oscommerce pretty much.

 

So for the product page for the pants I described above, I am not sure how to proceed in merging these 2 items (which is the final goal here, merging the 2 items into 1) because of a couple of things:

 

1. Currently the 2 pants are separate items so there is no attribute for inseam only on a per size basis.

2. I can maybe add 2 new option sets. inseam 32" : 32,34,36,37 & inseam 34":32,34,36,37

 

(the problem with 2 is that I use easy populate, so every time I add a new option set with that many attributes it makes ~100 new horizontal cells. and I don't plan on only doing this for the pants.

 

3. I cannot add a checkbox or anything because the prices don't always go up by the same amount either. check out the prices in the first link to see what i mean.

 

those are the issues. I am not sure if this is clear or not. Please feel free to ask me any questions. I may eventually pay a programmer to help sort this out. But i would love to get the logic down on how this should work. Any questions, assistance or ideas are greatly appreciated!