Adding Manufacturer to Products

My customer is asking if it would be possible to add in the manufacturer (to have a Manufacturer drop-down menu) for the products in the database. I know it can be done obviously, but is there anything with Dreamweaver or extensions I have that might cause problems with the existing code/SQL in the pages and totally screw things up?

What extensions and specific versions need to be installed that works is PS3 to do something like this and not cause interference?

What you can do is use the categories to display the manufacturer. The categories will show up in the Products menu. Would that be a satisfactory solution to the issue?

I had thought about that, and it's a great idea, but they want the categories available too---and here's the catch, there's 515+ manufacturers, not an easy task to make available and manageable. That's why just adding in a Manufac. field in the Insert/Change/Result pages would be even possible using dreamweaver without breaking PS3.

What kind of category structure are they looking to have? Having 515 manufacturers in a navigation menu is probably not a good idea in any case.

Single list drop-down menu like what DataAssist would build from scratch - and to make it easier adding in a category column in the ps3_products table to store the label derived from a manufacture table-- placement of this would have to be just somewhere easy to reach and not buried somewhere within the site

I took a different direction on this and it's working on the customer front-end pages, however creating the admin page - I duplicated the categores_Results.php page, made some necessary changes, added in the column in the ps3_products table for ProductManufacturer data to store info, although the new Results page isn't showing any of the info in the populated ps3_manufacturers table. At this point, I'm kinda lost as to how to get the list to show now below the New x Name field and Add button

Adding in the Manufacturers populated list in the Products_Update.php page, the data in the table isn't showing up. And also noticed that the Categories section isn't storing changes now. The products table has a ProductManufacturer table now to store this information--not using relationship table..still don't know quite how that works to get it work, so I'm doing what I know.

Unfortunately, you've ventured into an area that isn't supported. Adding in a new database table to store the different manufacturers and getting them integrated with the rest of the store is mainly custom code, so I can't help you much on this. If you posted in the Job board, there might be some other users on the forum that are willing to help you out on getting this set up.