How do I list sub-categories in sideboxes?

[thomakis]

Hi I'm a new forum member but lurker for some time so I have tried to seach for my answer first.

I have two product sub-categories set-up under one main category and I want display the two sub-categories in separate sideboxes. Is there a way to do this? thx

[gjh42]

Such a thing could be done in several ways, depending on exactly what you want. How do you want these sideboxes arranged? (Can they be one below the other, or do you want them in different parts of the page?)

Do these subcats have their own subcats? If not, why do you need sideboxes for them? Do they need to be category navigation-type menus, or can they just be boxes with a link to the particular category?

[thomakis]

Maybe I'm not explaining this too well. By default the template has a category box on the top left. As I add products they appear in this box and I ended up with a long list of products in there.

Now I want to devide my products into sub-categories so I created two sub-categories under the main category and moved the relevant products into them. But now that categories box on the top left just has my sub-categories listed in it and none of the products.

What I want is two boxes either side of the site, one displaying products in one of my sub-categories and the other displaying products in the second sub-category.

I hope that explains it, seems like it should be easy to do but I must be missing something.

[gjh42]

The stock categories menus never show individual products. You may have had a custom sidebox in your template; we would have to see it live to figure out more of what you need to do for this.

[thomakis]

The stock categories menus never show individual products. You may have had a custom sidebox in your template; we would have to see it live to figure out more of what you need to do for this.

Thank you but they do on my stock template, if I put the products directly in the top level category and have no sub-categories. I don't have a custom template just v1.5.

Maybe better if I explain exactly what I want to do.

Left side sidebox displaying products from one sub-category.
Right side sidebox displaying products from another sub-category.

There might be a different way to do it that I am not aware off but all I want is products displayed at either side on the webpage, in a box, with the title of the box being the relevant sub-category title.

I'll keep searching.

[gjh42]

Categories Dressing can do that for subcategories, with some clever styling and use of the ch_categories option bundled with the mod. There is discussion of helping someone to do something very similar in the Cat Dressing support thread a year or two back. You can put each product in its own subcategory with the same name as the product, and then you would get a menu that looked and acted like you want.

There is no way to show products directly in the categories sidebox without one of the "expanded category list" mods, and that would need special PHP coding added to limit it to one subcategory, plus cloning the sidebox and tweaking its special coding to show the second subcat.

I'll have to test a fresh install without the demo products, to see if the products actually show in the sidebox when you improperly use no categories at all. The stock sidebox has no code at all to show products.

[thomakis]

Categories Dressing can do that for subcategories, with some clever styling and use of the ch_categories option bundled with the mod. There is discussion of helping someone to do something very similar in the Cat Dressing support thread a year or two back. You can put each product in its own subcategory with the same name as the product, and then you would get a menu that looked and acted like you want.

There is no way to show products directly in the categories sidebox without one of the "expanded category list" mods, and that would need special PHP coding added to limit it to one subcategory, plus cloning the sidebox and tweaking its special coding to show the second subcat.

I'll have to test a fresh install without the demo products, to see if the products actually show in the sidebox when you improperly use no categories at all. The stock sidebox has no code at all to show products.

Thanks for all your help. I shall try out Category Dressing