Drupal dynamic product catalog (without commerce)

Question

So, I work at a web development agency and we recently decided to give our custom CMS up and start developing with Drupal. Currently, I am developing a wholesale product website. What I need to do is to create some product catalogs without using commerce since we do not need the purchase, checkout and payment features and I thought that using the built-in Content, Taxonomy and Views features we can get our job done.

I have created the product categories in Taxonomy. The main (root) categories are main Taxonomy objects and the subcategories are terms.

I created a custom Content type called: products. In this type I have the following form fields: Product Code, Name, Image, Description and a list field to choose the Terms I would like the product to be displayed in.

I would appreciate some help in order to set the whole structure up as I am still heavily influenced by the custom CMS we used to work on that had similar content management with Joomla!

In conclusion, I would like to:

1. Set a sidebar menu up that contains the categories and the subcategories as a tree. I would also like the menu to be updated if any changes occur in the taxonomy (e.g I add a term in taxonomy and it shows up on the menu).
2. Set the structure so that when someone clicks on a category that does NOT contain products but subcategories, gets the list of the categories bellow the active one.

I am really looking forward to your answers and I'd like to thank you in advance.

Answer 1

You could give a try to a combination of Taxonomy Menu and Menu Block modules. Taxonomy Menu allows you to easily generate menus from taxonomy vocabularies, and Menu Block creates menus and "menus portion", for instance, from level 2 to 3 from a specific point.

So basically, you can create menus from taxonomy and then create submenus from those menus with Menu Block. It can be tricky but you can do a lot of things with these modules.

Good luck