Hello AeroComic,
Just a few thoughts until official response can come on Monday, and because I wanted to think this over a little myself also.
- You can handle tag cloud tagging via an add-on, such as the Solspace Tag add-on module.
- Then you can handle advanced search including search on Tags via an add-on also. I’m aware that the Solspace Super Search module will include search on Solspace Tags as well as on many other sources, for example. It looks like it may be able to do this in a unified way, though you will have to verify for your purposes.
- no, I don’t work for Solspace—there are certainly other ways to arrange these things, including other Tag offerings.
Devot-ee.com is a great place to locate add-ons, and get a sense of what’s available, as well as what’s intended to work well in synergism. Another example for your tag search case might be DevDemon’s Tagger and Mark Croxton’s Search Fields.
- You can use EE custom fields to make it easy to have pull-down menu-settable classes of teeshirt identity, thus search. And so you can have multiple types of identity, which is more flexible than a single ‘category’ approach, I think. Custom fields are powerful and easy.
- You could in future use relationships, and perhaps with nicely interfaced add-on tools like Playa, to make it easy to have sidebar ‘related suggestions’. That’s a possible capability beyond what you ask, but may be interesting, and it could be applied at the class or individual tee-shirt level, depending on how detailed a business wanted to be.
- For e-commerce, you also have add-on choices, such as Cartthrob which has international features, or the recent BrilliantRetail, which are also on Devot-ee.
- for ease in setting up catalog pages, you could have a look at the very well-received Matrix add-on, also.
Regards, AeroComic,
Clive