two category sideboxes

[fakeDecoy]

Is there a way to add another category sidebox? I have "Home Equipment" and "Commercial Equipment", and I'm finding that it would be best to make them as separate as possible. Right now I have Commercial Equipment as a main category near the bottom of the rest, and it works as long as I link to it elsewhere on the site to make it more obvious, but it isn't ideal. Making two parent categories for Home and Commercial would waste space for category name lengths, because everything would be a subcategory of Home or Commercial.

Many Commercial products also have linked copies in Home, and it would need to stay that way.

Is this feasible?

[haredo]

Yes, you can. There are two way to create your delima!

1. Use easy pages, and rename the header to the category name you like.
2. Download section look under sideboxes.

[fakeDecoy]

I'm sort of familiar with using EZ Pages to create additional pages that I can link to from anywhere. I was hoping there was something that would be a little cleaner than manually creating a new sidebox with the category links I want, but then there's the issue of subcategories not displaying. And how would I disable the categories from appearing on the first sidebox?

I looked in the sideboxes area of Downloads and saw nothing that accomplishes this. Did I miss something?

[Ajeh]

You can fake the sidebox out and use the Document Products as the other category sidebox by marking the Categories as Document General and Products General ...

[fakeDecoy]

Wouldn't that disallow me from having linked products between the two sideboxes?

[Ajeh]

That I have not tried ...

Just set the setting on the Categories and not the Products and see if they can be Linked and behave normally ...

I think that should work ... I think ...

[fakeDecoy]

Ok, when I first read this suggestion I thought how dumb it sounded, but I gave it a try, and I have to say, thank you! The categories and products all seem to display exactly the way I want them to.

But I want to make sure I'm not setting myself up for problems. Here's what I did:

- Created new category, "Test Commercial Products"
- Restricted category to "Document - General" type only.
- Added product type restriction: "Products - General" to Test Commercial Products so I could create a general product and not just documents in the category.
- Cross-linked product and created a new product in the category.

With the third step above, the category is still showing up in the Documents sidebox, which is good. Is it because the first restricted product type of the category determines which sidebox to put the category in?

The only thing I need to do now besides copy/create products is rename the sideboxes in english.php. The products will all remain as Product - General type, so it feels pretty good to me.

Does anyone see a potential problem with this setup??

[Ajeh]

Setup the Category as:
Document - General
Product - General

This limits it to these two and triggers the switch to add the Category to the Document sidebox ...

[fakeDecoy]

Yeah, that's what I did.

[Ajeh]

The "trigger" is the Document General product type ... that says ... Put this Category in the Document sidebox and Skip this Category in the Categories sidebox ...