Let me run an idea by you guys. What do you say to the idea of removing the country nodes from the category hierarchy, and just moving the different toy lines up to the root? So instead of Japan, North America, and so on, you'd just have Generation 1, Generation 2, etc. I would then modify the country widget in such a way that a toy package can be linked to more than one country at once. And finally, when browsing, there would be a little country filter widget, so that if you want to you can view only toys from the countries you're interested in. What does that get us? Well, I could do away with hacked nodes like "Australia/New Zealand". A toy available in both those countries would simply have them both checked. Also, the category tree would compress some, as you wouldn't need multiple "Beast Wars" nodes for the different countries. And finally, we'd kill some data redundancy, as the country names would only be encoded in one place (the country table), as opposed to two places (the country table, and the category hierarchy).
On the downside, if you viewed the root without the country filter on, you'd see a hell of a lot of toylines in one list. But I think that's a minor complaint. What do you think?
- shmax
