thanks for the swift reply. We had the 'product features' extension purchased and installed, and found it only allows you to create and attach attributes to some specific products (manually), then shows a link(s) to these attributes related products over your home page
About the same could be achieved putting related products in category and clicking on it in menu, or using built-in 'featured' block -- unless you need to hand-pick several groups of random products out of your whole stockpile in order to advertise all of these diverse groups via these hyperlinks on a storefront page (that's where this extension might help). however be warned that it likely won't work with the cool HTML5 template, only the orange default (at least, that is what happened to us).
anyway, sorry that it wasn't clear from the description how this is different from our problem:
imagine you have 15 categories (Make), each having 20 sub-categories (Model), that in turn have 10 sub-sub-categories for the actual types of products.
Overall, you have to deal with 15 x 20 x 10 = 3000 sub-categories not easily manageable via Menu or Search..
that's where you desperately need a new block or extension to browse these categories via 3 (or more) dropdown menus: choose the 1st category, let its sub-categories to load dynamically into the next dropdown; go on till you reach the bottom sub-category. There are some great details with 2 opencart extensions referred above, and it can be seen in action at demo.sophio.com
This kind of 'dynamic subcategories selector' is really the only reasonable way to show correct product content the first time if you have more or less many products/subcategories. All it does, it selects child sub-categories on the fly at each step from 1 DB table (ab_categories?).
