Yesterday at work I spent far too much time working on getting an accordion vertical navigation working in a new Magento design. In the interest of public education, here’s a walkthrough of how I went about getting this to work.
Basically what was required was a simple form of an accordion menu where only the top-level categories will be visible initially but clicking on one will open up a submenu showing its children. It will also set that category as the current one and display the content for it.
Getting the basics up and running was fairly easy but I kept running into problems when I attempted to smooth out the rough edges. I ran into the old problem of Magento being very poorly documented, so trying to find out what avenues I could pursue took far longer than it should have. I also ran into a definite bug where there exist several functions for retrieving the parent of a category but they don’t actually work. I believe this stems from the fact that the parent_id values for categories are not entered into the database in the first place. Odd, and it shows that Magento really does have plenty of jagged edges.
I started out with this post on the Magento forums. That set up a vertical list of top-level categories but displays the rest of the menu in much the same manner as the horizontal one in the default Magento design – as a popup nested list. Not what I was looking for.
Because I only wanted the current category to show up I added in a condition to check whether or not a category was “active” before displaying its children. Doing this works but unfortunately I was using a call to $this->getCurrentChildren() to retrieve the children of the top-level active category. This works when you click on the top-level links – the children are displayed correctly on the loaded page – but doesn’t work when you navigate to one of the child categories, since obviously they are then set to the current category and will have different children to the top-level category.
I then came up with the simple idea of calling $_category->getParentCategory() and getting the children of that. This is when I ran into the aforementioned bug with the parent categories (see bug #5182) which meant it was impossible to use that way.
After thinking through (and trying out) a few crazy ideas like building my own tree of categories and querying it, or overriding the majority of the Magento catalog navigation classes, I eventually realised the answer was actually quite simple, at least for the two level system I required (I haven’t tried it for more levels). All I had to do was check if each top-level category was active and had children and, if so, display the children. This works since a parent category is still active if one of it’s children is active. (I assume this functionality was added to make it easier to set highlighting styles on these categories.)
Here’s my modified vert_nav.phtml file:
<div class="vertical-nav-container box base-mini">
<div class="vertical-nav">
<div class="head">
<h4>< ?php echo $this->__('Navigation') ?></h4>
</div>
<ul id="nav_vert">
< ?php foreach ($this->getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>
< ?php $open = $this->isCategoryActive($_category) && $_category->hasChildren(); ?>
<li><a href="<?=$this->getCategoryUrl($_category);?>"< ?php if($open) { echo ' class="open"'; } ?>>< ?=$_category->getName();?></a>
< ?php if ($open): ?>
<ul>
< ?php foreach ($_category->getChildren() as $child): ?>
< ?php $childCat = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($child); ?>
<li><a href="<?=$this->getCategoryUrl($childCat);?>">< ?=$childCat->getName();?></a></li>
< ?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>
< ?php endif; ?>
</li>
< ?php endforeach ?>
</ul>
</div>
</div>Originally I also tried to use $_category->getAllChildren() as this sounded more like what I wanted but this returned nothing so I went with what I have above, which works. It would be nice if there was a method that directly returned the children as category objects, rather than having to load them as an extra step – if such a method exists I didn’t find it so let me know if it is in there!
Everything else is roughly the same as the other vertical navigation tutorial. You’ll need to tweak your CSS to achieve a nicer nesting effect. I used left margins to indent the child category links.
Here are some images from the final product:
SO HELPFUL!!!!! you are a lifesaver, out of interest how long did it take you to work out the code to display different parts of the system (subcategories) if you have any tips, they would be really appreciated
Is there any way you could post up some CSS tips on how to change the design? Im new to magento so any pointers would be greatly appreciated
Peter, what kind of tips are you looking for?
VERY Helpful1 Thank you posting this. I’m wondering whether in your search for this solution you may have come across anything that may help me with my current problem.
Essentially, I want to display the items in my store using two different category views – the standard set of categories (Men’s Apparel, women’s apparel, accessories, etc.) and by brand (O’neil, Stussy, etc.). On my homepage, I;d like to display only the children of the "by brand" category – in other words, I want a list in the left column of all of the brands we carry that links to their respective category pages. I;ve organized my categories so that the root category contains the default category listing and, under that, are two children categories – "Shop by Brand" and "Shop by Department". I;d like to only displays the "Shop By Brand" children in my left box on the homepage. Any idea how I can accomplish this? How do I call on a specific category ID and start going through its children?
Thank you so much!
Rob Z.
Brilliant article. It’s given me exactly the starting point that I needed. I’m now altering it a bit to go to three levels of category, and to only show the current ‘tree’ that i’m in, rather than the whole lot.
Thanks very much.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for this great article – it helped me a lot. I’ve become a loyal reader of your blog!
By any chance do you know how to create a navigation based on an attribute? something like ‘shop by manufacturer’ (in the homepage) – that will generate a list of manufacturers available in the site and then when clicked it’d show the products in grid/list view.
Any comments would be really appreciated! – there you have my email in case you’d prefer to email me directly!
Thanks Chris, keep up the great work, contributing some good aussie modules!
Regards,
John
Where do the vert_nav file go? I have no idea where to put it.
The vert_nav.phtml file should be located at template/catalog/navigation/vert_nav.phtml, as in the tutorial I linked to.
Hello & Ty Chris for this helpful example.
However dunno if I have made something wrong but the subcategories name [called with $_category->getName()] aren’t translated with the current language (view) while the categories are correctly shown.
Can somebody confirm this? Ty in advance.
^ Nevermind, I have extended Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation (navigation.php) and added a DrawLeftNavItem function tweaking the DrawItem original one:
vert_nav.phtml:
__(‘Navigation’) ?>
getStoreCategories() as $_category):
drawLeftNavItem($_category) ?>
overridden app/code/local/MyCompany/Catalog/Block/navigation.php :
class MyCompany_Catalog_Block_Navigation extends Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation
{
public function drawLeftNavItem($category, $level=0, $last=false)
{
$html = ”;
if (!$category->getIsActive()) {
return $html;
}
$children = $category->getChildren();
$hasChildren = $children && $children->count();
$html.= ‘getRequestPath());
if ($this->isCategoryActive($category)) {
$html.= ‘ active’;
}
if ($last) {
$html .= ‘ last’;
}
if ($hasChildren && $this->isCategoryActive($category)) {
$cnt = 0;
foreach ($children as $child) {
if ($child->getIsActive()) {
$cnt++;
}
}
$html .= ‘ parent’;
}
$html.= ‘”>’.”\n”;
$html.= ‘getCategoryUrl($category).’”>’.$this->htmlEscape($category->getName()).’‘.”\n”;
//$html.= ”.$level.”;
if ($hasChildren && $this->isCategoryActive($category)) {
$j = 0;
$htmlChildren = ”;
foreach ($children as $child) {
if ($child->getIsActive()) {
$htmlChildren.= $this->drawLeftNavItem($child, $level+1, ++$j >= $cnt);
}
}
if (!empty($htmlChildren)) {
$html.= ”.”\n”
.$htmlChildren
.”;
}
}
$html.= ”.”\n”;
return $html;
}
}
Hmm the code isn’t displayed properly, sorry for the mess, I will add it to the original magento thread: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewreply/17585/
Regards.
I am having trouble getting this to work. I get:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 45754140 bytes) in magento\app\Mage.php on line 587
Hi all,
I have the same problem that subcategories wont change the wording when switching the language. I searched the whole thread http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewreply/17585/
but couldn´t find a solution for that. Would be great if you could porst the code again with a short how to do.
Thanks
nod
hi, thank you for your cool post,
with me the code doesn’t pull any sub categories, or children (i take it a sub category is a child)
could the code be busted from the blog? i did notice weird spaces and short phptags..? can you check it out for me, here is my code:
__(‘Navigation’) ?>
getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>
isCategoryActive($_category) && $_category->hasChildren(); ?>
<a href=”getCategoryUrl($_category);?>”>getName();?>
getChildren() as $child): ?>
load($child); ?>
<a href=”getCategoryUrl($childCat);?>”>getName();?>
See anything I’m not?
wins
grr no worries, blog busted code =]
I followed the instructions in the forum-thread, and it worked great. But when I replaced the vert_nav.phtml-code with the one on this website, I get an errormessage: “..Undefined variable: _category in…” in line 42, which means the line starting with “”.
I am using Magento version 1.2.0.1, and I did check that I really reaplaced the code correctly.
Anybody?
Thanks!
Inlcuded is the first few lines of the error:
Notice: Undefined variable: _category in /home/frodefi/SW57TTQI/htdocs/magento/app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/navigation/vert_nav.phtml on line 42 Trace: #0 /home/frodefi/SW57TTQI/htdocs/magento/app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/navigation/vert_nav.phtml(42): mageCoreErrorHandler(8, 'Undefined varia...', '/home/frodefi/S...', 42, Array) #1 /home/frodefi/SW57TTQI/htdocs/magento/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php(144): include('/home/frodefi/S...')The text editor I used in the above message to control the file, inserted an line break on the long line (my line 42) which made this (without whishes, used nano).
Then it did not so well either, because now it did not show any categories. But when I removed all the spaces between “< ?php” and “< ?=” then it work. Sort of. But nothing like the picutres on this website.And without subcategories. Maybe I have changed so much that the problem is really elsewhere… Well…
Have somebody tested that this works with the latest version, 1.2.0.1?
Man you saved me a lot of time. VERY THANKS!
very very appreciated!
Beautiful.
Worked like a charm.
Thanks
Great Magento stuff Chris, Thx. (love the Australian ext & WYSIWYG)
Tried to set up the accordian catalogue above and had to remove some spaces from one of the lines like Frode. Now getting
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in /home/japansno/public_html/sandpit/app/design/frontend/default/idark116/template/catalog/navigation/vert_nav.phtml on line 22
Anyone have any ideas, I’m no coder
Cheers
Simo
I have installed v1.3 when i change the vert_nav.phtml its crashes the whole site. has anyone else had this problem?
here’s a working example …
http://www.robertredd.earlyman.com/magento
Magento v1.3 with some modification (margins, padding, and redefining where the background arrows show up.
This is a dev site, so sorry if the link may be broken in the future.
@ Steinar, do you have all the code that made this work as i have tried loads and nothing is working.
Hey, Just been using this tutorial for a website and keep getting the following error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘<’ in /home/public_html/app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/navigation/vert_nav.phtml on line 41
Below is line 40 and 41
getStoreCategories() as $_category):
drawLeftNavItem($_category)?>
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If you want to use this with flat categories in Magento 1.3.2++ you need to check to see if flat categories are enabled and call a slightly different method.
The code then becomes:
__(‘Navigation’) ?>
getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>
isCategoryActive($_category) && $_category->hasChildren(); ?>
<a href=”getCategoryUrl($_category);?>”>getName();?>
isEnabled()) {
$children = $_category->getChildrenNodes();
} else {
$children = $_category->getChildren();
}?>
load($child); ?>
<a href=”getCategoryUrl($childCat);?>”>getName();?>
Hmm – wordpress butchered that last comment – the key thing is to add in a check like this:
if (Mage::helper(‘catalog/category_flat’)->isEnabled()) {
$children = $_category->getChildrenNodes();
} else {
$children = $_category->getChildren();
}?>
Then call the second for each loop on the $children object ie
load($child); ?>
<a href=”getCategoryUrl($childCat);?>”>
getName();?>
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@Ben
could you please post the exact code for using with 1.3.2++ as i havent been able to get this working at all.
Lee
@Ben
I’m also interested. I managed to have the vertical navigation, however subcategories do not show up.
Regards
my question:
did this process require you to edit the catalog.xml file? I’ve been trying to implement vertical navigation using other tutorials, and each of them require editing the catalog.xml file, which for me, results in an internal 500 error. no good.
thanks for sharing this!
For those who are not getting Subcategories by clicking on individual categories OR simply throwing error on clicking the category,
change this line:
load($child); ?>
to:
load($child->getId()); ?>
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hi ,
Thanks for the great article,i implemented it successfully but the
the sub-categories won’t show. can any one help me on this
Thankx