Thread

Hi all, quite a common problem I seem to face when working with multiple entries in EE. I’m building a store with around 200 - 300 items, which I have split in to category groups so I can order them in to both product type and brand.

There a total of 6 product types (category group 1) and 29 brands (category group 2) with some brands offering all of the 6 product ranges, some offering 3 or 4 and a handful just specialising in the one.

I wish to make the navigation of the items as simple and effective as possible and I have decided to make the primary navigation focusing on the product categorys and push the relevant entries into a template named ‘products’ - below is what I’m using to generate the navigation, which works fine.

<nav id="primary-navigation">
<ul>
{exp:channel:categories channel="products" style="linear" category_group="1" show_empty="yes"}<li><a href="/product/category/{category_url_title}" title="Shop for {category_name}" class="board-rollover">{category_name}</a></li>{/exp:channel:categories}
</ul> 
</nav>

Using this method it will group all the entries from within the category group and also lists all the brands from the other category too.

What I’m looking to do is to refine the search and create a secondary (sub) navigation that further allows to filter further down for items still within the selected product group but then further grouped by brand too….Im envisaging a secondary navigation menu listing only the brands that have the initial product in their inventory?

I have been racking my brains on this to try and find a suitable solution and would appreciate any assistance.

Hi Scott - I suspect you’ll want to do this with a custom query that does a join between entries and the category groups, filtering the list to only those that match.  The only way to do it with the entries and category loops would be with some rather ugly looking embeds, which obviously you would want to try to avoid.  I’m no query module expert so I can’t tell you what the query specifics would look like, but that’s the direction I suspect you’ll need to take and a member of the community could give you some guidance on that.

Thankyou John, yes its proving very difficult at the moment - hoping someone can help me to achieve what Im after - I’ve seen many stores that offer this way of browsing so sure it can be done 😉

Thanks for responding

http://www.train-ee.com/courseware/free-tutorials/comments/simple-multifaceted-navigation-using-categories

It does use an embedded template - but those really aren’t the devil…;)