X-Cart forums

[captcha]

Our store has just 3 top categories and no subcategories; we would like the links to products to be displayed when you hover on the category (so that instead of subcategories, it shows the products).

We would like a graceful solution and are prepared to buy a mod that does this.

We tried Fancy categories and that does not allow for this feature.
We would like to show the products available for every category in the left navigation menu.

motherplusbaby.com

[balinor]

Have you had a look in the Custom Mods forum? I believe I saw a mod that doees this a while back...

[carpeperdiem]

You are looking for THIS MOD that I find very useful. I use it.

I also use the horiozontal (and I also bought the vertical) flyout menus from PhilJ. This is a CSS solution that eliminates the need for "fancy categories". Yes, you could do it yourself, but it's easier to buy it from PhilJ.

Used together, you can assign a single product to a single category, and when the customer selects the category, it navigates to the single product detail page.

You don't need PhilJ's category menus to make this work... if you're satisfied with the look and feel of the stock cat menus, then you're ok with just the first mod.

It works well in 4.1.3

How cool is this?

[captcha]

Originally Posted by balinor

Have you had a look in the Custom Mods forum? I believe I saw a mod that doees this a while back...

I searched for hours through the Template customization forum and the entire x-cart forums without success. I was surprised not to find posts regarding this, so it must be somewhere...

However, I managed to custom code the menu, and will post the code here next week, after all is done.
For anyone else looking for this, the logic I used is to get all the products in a variable, and loop through that variable to create a DHTML menu (changes in categories.tpl); then I use a template call for every product that is listed.)

I tried two kinds of menus, one is displayed on click of the mouse, and the other on hover/mouseover. They both work very well.

Of course, stores with very large product databases should take care of speed/performance issues with getting the entire list of products into menus.

[captcha]

Originally Posted by carpeperdiem

You are looking for THIS MOD that I find very useful. I use it.
...
How cool is this?

It is cool, but that wasn't what I was looking for
Even the xcartmods show only subcategories in their menus, I wanted the products displayed, instead.

But auto-displaying the only/sole product or subcategory code could be useful some other time, thanks.

[carpeperdiem]

ok....but what if your category (or sub-category) name and the product name are identical?

You say you have 3 categories...

cat1
cat2
cat3

let's say you have 8 products per category...

make 8 subcats per cat (assign only 1 product per subcat) and then use the mod that takes you to the product if its the only product in a cat or subcat.

I am doing exactly this in my "makeup and brush kits" category, although there are only 3 products (subcats) in this category...

YMMV.

Good luck.

[captcha]

Since we do not have any need for subcategories (like I said, we have only 3 categories and no subcats), right now the loop only gets products. If a product was in a subcat, it would still show under the main categories, irrespective of the subcat it was under.

I find it a bit odd to create a subcategory for every product, just to get something simple like this working. I noticed that for product listings this seemed to be the workaround many people used. I guess it depends on the particular cart implementation, a custom mod that takes care of say 3 levels of subcats (incl. products) would be good.

What you have said is fine for single product categories and subcategories. But on our store, the category page lists all products in that category (because there are no subcats), and that works for us.