duplicate parent/child category

[ontariod]

v4.2.1 Hosted
Sigma

With my site I plan on marketing to 250 cities within the U.S. I have 50 parent categories(all the states). In the states I have 250 child categories(the cities). Each city will have 12 child categories within the city, plus those child categories will have a total of 100 child categories attached. This is a lot to manually duplicate. How can I duplicate the 12 child categories with the 100 categories that I've attached to each of the 250 cities without having to do each and every child category to each city one by one. HELP!!

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

In direct answer to your question, I would use the phpMyAdmin and export the category table to a spreadhsheet (excel) or a csv. Then you can do whatever you wish locally on your computer assigning the appropriate parent category id's. Delete all of the original categories once you are done so you don't have duplicates and then again with phpMyAdmin import the file.

Personally, it makes no sense whatsoever to me to structure your category list the way that you are. Have you considered the implications of doing it this way? Not only from the end user experience, but also from your business marketing/advertising plan and budget?

Consider the fact that you are having this much trouble just trying to enter all of these... This same issue will then be experienced by your end users. Each person that wants to place an ad as well as a search will select a category from a drop down menu that has...300,300 categories in it according to my calculations. I can't even imagine how long it will take the server to calculate the total ads in each category if you choose to show totals in a category display. Are you planning on spending money in each of your 250 cities to advertise and market the site?

I'm not trying to be harsh, but I am trying to bring reality to light in your plan. Many people want to do it like this, because they want to be just like Craig's list or eBay. The reality is that in both of these cases, these companies have server banks, staff with software engineers/programmers, database experts, servers in the thousands and advertising/marketing budgets in the hundreds of thousands per month.

[ontariod]

From what you just told me, how do I allow the states feature to show on the homepage.
Also, in phpmyadmin where do we add cities for the states, and what is the proper syntax to import files from excel?

Can you provide an example.