I’m pretty sure i missunderstood you…
Approach: Categories & Terms (built in taxonomies)
You have got categories (hierarchical built in taxonomy) & terms (non-hierarchical built in taxonomy). You can also assign terms to categories. So i’d say, you can take the following approach using the built in taxonomies:
- shoes (parent category)
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- boots (child category)
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- sneakers (child category)
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- other shoes (default child category)
and then use terms inside additional categories like:
- color (parent cateogry)
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- cyan (term)
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- magenta (term)
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- yellow (term)
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- black (term)
- laces (parent category)
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- long (term)
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- medium (term)
and so on …
- medium (term)
This would give you the ability to list all shoes on a category page. Then you can further list all sneakers on one page. You can also list all shoes that got long laces and red color.
Templates
Take a look at (for eg.) here for more information about the query for different archive (category/term) pages and how to query/retrieve multiple taxonomies at one page.