[David-Allan]

Originally Posted by JWait

Are you trying to include your "popular categories" within the "All Categories" box or separately?

separately in a little box above the category box.

Originally Posted by JWait

Do you want "flyout menus" or just a list?

Flyout menu's would really be the best looking option but if that is too difficult then just static categories would be fine.

Originally Posted by JWait

Anyway, the easiest way is to make a "clone" of common_files/customer/categories.tpl naming it popular_categories.tpl.

Something like this...

{capture name=menu}
  {assign var="additional_class" value="menu-fancy-categories-list"
  <ul>
    
      <li{interline name=categories}><a href="LINK TO CATEGORY" title="CATEGORY NAME">CATEGORY NAME</a></li>

  </ul>

  {assign var="additional_class" value="menu-categories-list"}

{/capture}
{include file="customer/menu_dialog.tpl" title="Popular Categories" content=$smarty.capture.menu}
{/if}

Change the part that says "<li{interline name=categories}><a href="LINK TO CATEGORY" title="CATEGORY NAME">CATEGORY NAME</a></li>" to your link and title, and repeat for each category.

Then, in customer/left_bar.tpl for whatever skin you are using, look for
{include file="customer/categories.tpl"}

and just above it add
{include file="customer/popular_categories.tpl"}

EDIT: I made a mistake and forgot to exclude "flyout menus" in my original post (fixed now)

Ahh ok thanks mate, so basically I use:

 <li{interline name=categories}><a href="LINK TO CATEGORY" title="CATEGORY NAME">CATEGORY NAME</a></li>

for each category I want to list in between the list tags?

I'll give this a wee bash now on my dev site and see if I can get it to work.

Thank you so much for your help and speedy reply, I really appreciate it.