Products page for each brand

Question

My main goal is to have pages listting products by each brand available.

From this answer I understood that you can make it possible by serach pages.

All products have 'manufacturer' attribute. To set up search pages you need to make sure that the attrubute is available in search. Then you should be able to access all products by the brand following example.com/?manufacturer=apple to see all apple products. Howerver, this link returns the front page.

if I use serach and enter apple it returns a page with url

http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=apple

and use the brand filter, select apple the url becomes

http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?manufacturer=285&q=apple

Next three links return back to home page, What am I missing here?

http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?manufacturer=285

http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/?manufacturer=285

http://www.example.com/?manufacturer=285

Link below returns 404 page

http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/?manufacturer=285

Are there other other ways to genertae pages with a list of products by this brands?

Please do not offer extensions.

Answer 1

you cannot use the search result url without having the q parameter in it (the search query).
But you can use the advanced search url without any q parameter.
Just make sure your manufacturer attribute can be used in advanced search.

Then you can use this url:

http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?manufacturer[]=285

Answer 2

If you want to show products based on their brands, two simple solutions:

1. Create category as per Brand name & add products for that brand only. (No coding required)

2. Create CMS pages for brands. Call a phtml inside & load products by apply manufacturer filter. (Some coding required)

Answer 3

Actually you are missing URL param "q" in your urls

http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?manufacturer=285

It should be like:

http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?manufacturer=285&q=apple

Below two URL's are incorrect:

http://www.example.com/catalogsearch/result/?manufacturer=285

http://www.example.com/?manufacturer=285