In Magento, how can I organize products from different categories under a parent entity which in turn has it's own attributes?

The actual use case is similar to a multi-vendor implementation in that the store should display products from many different vendors, but each one only requires it's own landing page (not a problem), and to have some vendor attributes, like address, accessible easily from the products.

No ba开发者_运维知识库ck-end interface or access control is required for the individual vendor.

Categories with custom attributes would have worked except that then a single vendor could only exist under one category, and not several.

How feasible is it to build a new content type into the Magento system to handle this?

I'm interested to hear any ideas. Thanks!

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A product can be assigned to more than one category. You could have special 'vendor' categories that list their respective products and have their "Include in menu" setting to false. It is then possible to link to their URL as a landing page without them showing the normal menu.