Robert Hurst

actually I was thinking more like some time between now and WordPress 3.4. WordPress 4 is too long away.

By the way I didn’t mean to come down on WordPress 3.0, Its the best yet by miles. I just see MySQL dependency as a great detriment in the future.

i figured it out this is what I have now

function get_product_manufacturers($var=NULL)
{
	global $wpdb;
	$query = 'SELECT * FROM akt_products ORDER BY id asc';
	$results = $wpdb->get_results($query);
	foreach($results as $row)
	{
		$manufacturers_all[$row->id] = stripcslashes(htmlspecialchars_decode($row->manufacturer));
		$manufacturers = array_unique($manufacturers_all);
	}
	if($var=='all')
	{
		return $manufacturers_all;
	}else{
		return $manufacturers;
	}
}

function get_product_categories($var=NULL)
{
	//get the catergories
	global $wpdb;
	$query = 'SELECT * FROM akt_products ORDER BY id asc';
	$results = $wpdb->get_results($query);
	foreach($results as $row)
	{
		$categories_all[$row->id] = stripcslashes(htmlspecialchars_decode($row->category));
	}

	//build the array - NOT UNIQUE!
	$manufacturers_all = get_product_manufacturers('all');
	if($var==NULL):
		break;
	elseif($var=='all'):
		$categories = array_unique($categories_all);
	else:
		$i=0;
		foreach($manufacturers_all as  $key => $manufacturer)
		{
			if($manufacturer != $var)
			{}
			elseif($manufacturer == $var)
			{
				$categories_current[$i] = $categories_all[$key];
			}
			$i++;
		}
		$categories = array_unique($categories_current);
	endif;
	return $categories;
}