This could be done with Alt Categories (if they are made to co-exist better with sorts), but it would be nice if there were a way to automate the process.

What I was thinking would be for a category like:

http://run-down.com/...ges/NCAA_Division_I/

Where there are nearly 700 colleges in the 30 subcategories (conferences). I would like to have another subcategory that is an alphabetical listing of the colleges in all those subcategories, so that people have a third option for searching for schools (in addition to the regular category structure and searches).

To do this manually with Alt Categories would be an immense project. What I'm thinking is a flag of some sort to turn this on for specified categories or subcategories, which would then include any subcategories below the one specified. I suppose this could get rather confusing if you specified a one within another...

Obviously, one problem would be the sheer number of links that would end up being built into the large alphabetical page. I suppose it could be taken a step further by having it designed to build a subcategory for each letter of the alphabet the new section. Thus, for the example above, you would have:

http://run-down.com/...ision_I/All_Colleges
http://run-down.com/...ion_I/All_Colleges/A
http://run-down.com/...ion_I/All_Colleges/B
...
http://run-down.com/...ion_I/All_Colleges/Z

Does this sound like something that could be done?

By the way, what's the thought on # of links per page vs. spanning vs. all-in-one-page, both in terms of server load, usability, and page views? I go with 30 links per page, as I find the 10 per page that many SE's use annoyingly few. As a user, I think I'd rather see everything in one page, although waiting for everything to load (especially with a large category) is a bad thing...

Thanks,
Dan