Categories

[midfin]

Hi -
I am new to this and my client wants categories and sub categories in the navigation.

An example:
By Occasion (category)
Wedding
Engagement
New Baby

For Recipient (category)
for him
for her
for teens

I have set up pages and links but I can't figure out how to create categories or if it is at all possible.

Thanks!

[Jim]

A category in ShopSite is just a page that contains either products or links to pages that have products on them. You could create sub categories in the same way.

So for your example you would create 8 pages
By Occasion
Wedding
Engagement
New Baby
For Recipient
for him
for her
for teens

Then on the pages screen you would select your main category page "By Ocassion" and click the Assign Items button. YOu would then select the Page option and click Proceed and you will see a list of all your pages in the bottom box and an empty top box. You would select the Wedding, Engagement, New Baby pages and Add them so they move to the top box. Then click Save Changes. This will have added links for the 3 pages to the main category page of By Occasion.

You would repeat the steps for the For Recipient page, assigning the him, her, teens pages.

Now you would assign products to the various category pages Wedding, Engagement, Baby etc. by selecting the page on the Pages screen and clicking the Assign Items button and selecting the Product option and proceed as above. Note that if you want subcategories off of one of the pages such as For Teens you would create the appropriate page such as Swimsuits, Shoes, Pants, Blouses, Shirts etc, YOu would assign these category pages to the For Teens page just like you assigned the For Teens page to the For Recipient page (category) and you would assign products to these pages in the same way.

Hope that is clear enough to get you started.

[midfin]

Thanks for your help.

How do I get the navigation to set up by the category. In other words, I want "by occasion" and then the sub categories to line up under it in the nav.

[Jim]

On the Pages screen use the Arrange Items button and then move the page links around to get the order that you want. If you want the sub categories indented a little you could use some html space   characters in front of the link name or page name depending on which you are using for the link.

If you have a Pro store you could create a custom template do several loop link sections to generate the list on the fly. This would require using custom fields and some IF logic to select which links to display. This is more complicated but would allow you more flexibility.