I started “skinning” Magento today with a design that I was given. The functionality called for was a left category navigation (on every page but customer pages and cart/checkout pages) that always displayed the main categories – but when you click on a category, Magento should take you to that category’s listing, but also display the current subcategories.
So – since we all know that the Magento documentation is pretty crappy at this time, I had to do a lot of digging through core files, and a lot of time just with trial and error. But, I finally did come up with something that works. I’m willing to bet that there is a better, more proper way to do it, but regardless, this seems to be working perfectly.
What I did was create a new PHTML file, created the proper block call in page.xml, and now I’ve got a great working (and looking!) left-navigation. Here’s the home page (left), and a category page (right):
And the code:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | <h3>Browse by Category:</h3> <ul> <?php $obj = new Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation(); $store_cats = $obj->getStoreCategories(); $current_cat = $obj->getCurrentCategory(); $current_cat = (is_object($current_cat) ? $current_cat->getName() : ''); foreach ($store_cats as $cat) { if ($cat->getName() == $current_cat) { echo '<li class="current"><a href="'.$this->getCategoryUrl($cat).'">'.$cat->getName()."</a>\n<ul>\n"; foreach ($obj->getCurrentChildCategories() as $subcat) { echo '<li><a href="'.$this->getCategoryUrl($subcat).'">'.$subcat->getName()."</a></li>\n"; } echo "</ul>\n</li>\n"; } else { echo '<li><a href="'.$this->getCategoryUrl($cat).'">'.$cat->getName()."</a></li>\n"; } } ?> </ul> |
If you know of a better way to do this – please let me know!
Looks good, but if i click on an subcategory the menu is closing the subcategory:
Take a look:
http://www.spleen-art.com/spleen
it helped me alot ….. great work buddy…
Great work! I’ve been looking for this. Thanks so much!
its working fine.. cheers!!
cheers mate, you are a gun!
I looks good, but what if I want to overwrite the Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation class?
Then I won’t be able to use my custom methods in this code.
A better way to initialize the block is
$obj = $this->getLayout()->createBlock(‘catalog/navigation’);
use full code thanks to Magento
Good stuff. Magento is powerful, weak on documentation, and marginally bloated. But until I build or find better I am all in.
it works perfect! thank you! just what I was looking for. magento should have this by default… LOL
I can’t get the categories URL
Thanks for your code!
It’s good to display 2-tier categories. But how to display more than 2-tier subcategories like this?
thx, it will be my better project to solve the promble!
I also cannot retrieve the URL, the href ends up blank: href=”"
@gast + @amanda
The links will only work if you include this code in a block with type=”catalog/navigation”.