I want to create a page in Magento that shows a visual representation of the categories.. example
CATEGORY
product 1
product 2
ANOTHER CATEGORY
product 3
My problem is, their database is organised very differently to what I've seen in the past. They have tables dedicated to data types like varchar, int, etc. I assume this is for performance or similiar.
I haven't found a way to use MySQL to query the database and get a list of categories. I'd then like to match these categories to products, to get a listing of products for each category. Unfortunately Magento seems to make this very difficult.
Also I have not found a method that will work from within a page block.. I have created showcase.phtml and put it in the XML layout and it displays and runs it's PHP code. I was hoping for something easy like looping through $this->getAllCategories(); and then a nested loop inside with something like $category->getChildProducts();
Can anyone help me? Thank you!