PrestaShop: Creating a specialized supplier page - themes

Question

We are planning to develop furniture shop with PrestaShop. I am a newbie with PrestaShop and am interested to know more about it. The following is the scenario that we have:
In the shop, we would like the top navigation to list the areas in the house (e.g. dining, bedroom, etc). When we hover this, there will be a dropdown menu with a list of furniture type (e.g. dining chairs, dining tables, and so forth).
In addition to that, the left side will be a list of "collections". Each collection can contain items that are of different furniture types. E.g. Collection A can have a dining chair, living room chair, and so forth.
In the list of collections, there is a possibility to have a "special" collection. This collection will have a different layout page compared to the other collections.
Hence, I am wondering if:
Is this possible to use Prestashop? I can see that #1 is possible using the categories feature (1st level category as the areas in the house and 2nd level category as the furniture types). Also, #2 might be possible using "Suppliers" or "Manufacturers". What I am concerned, is there a way to actually separate "suppliers" / "manufactures" as "specials"?
If it is possible, can we actually create a specialized page for these?
Thank you so much for your help everyone! Any kind of suggestions would be great! I look forward to hear from you!

Answer 1

For each of your 3 needs:
You are correct that PS's categories will allow you to do this. The category system allows you to have a hierarchy of categories that is as deep as you need, and what you described is exactly how it's meant to be used.
As you hinted, you can use either suppliers or manufacturers for this by simply changing the name to "Collections" and associating products with the correct suppliers (if you choose supplier instead of collection). You can add a description to a supplier or manufacturer that will appear by default before the list of products.
You can add a custom description to each supplier or manufacturer page, but I think you're looking for even more variation. If the layout change you need for "special" collections isn't too extensive, you could achieve it by doing something tricky in the page template which checks what page is currently being displayed, and shows or hides HTML or executes Javascript based on the result. This would provide quite a bit of flexibility, even though it's "dirty" in the sense that you'd have to hardcode information in a template. A better way to achieve this would be to override the manufacturer controller (assuming you chose to use the manufacturer to represent collections) to use a different template for certain manufacturer IDs. I haven't tested this code, but I think it's pretty close to what you'd need to put in the override directoryalong with a new template called manufacturer-custom.tpl in your theme:
class ManufacturerController extends ManufacturerControllerCore {
// array with the selected manufacturers
private $customManufacturers = array(1, 2, 3);
public function init() {
parent::init();
if (in_array($this->manufacturer->id, $this->customManufacturers)) {
$this->setTemplate(_PS_THEME_DIR_.'manufacturer-custom.tpl');
}
}
}