How To Make Left Column Category Menu Appear On All pages?

[wave_werks]

Howdy folks!

Great forums you have here! There's quite an amazing amount of info. I did a quick search but was not able to find an answer to a troubling issue.

It should be known that I'm in the demo process of AbleCommerce and the new Interspire Shopping Cart and having some custom development quotes done by AbleCommerce Partners and Interspire partners. In the meantime, I'm working on some of the basic layout, look, and feel of what my finished site will be. One of the things that is troubling me in AbleCommerce is that the home (default) page of the 30-day online demo (Glass WhiteLilly theme) has a traditional category menu using standard sidebar 1 in the left column. However, when I move to a category page or product page the left column becomes a "narrow/expand results" menu which I is "category search" . Then, if I change to standard sidebar 1 I get blank left column with using standard sidebar 1 along with a breadcrumb trail at the top of the page showing where I've gone. How do I go about keeping the complete default category menu from the home page in place and visible on all of the pages of the site instead of the category search menu or the blank menu? Id like for the user to have access to the left column category menus at all times. Is this something that can only be done with a full license of AbleCommerce 7 or should I be able to make it happen even in the 30-day demo?

Thanks for any info, insight, comments, concerns, or otherwise.

- Jeff

[jmestep]

It can be done-- see this post:
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=8218&hilit=[[ConLib%3ASimplecategoryList

[wave_werks]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I followed the instructions using the 30-day demo but it appears that certain functions may be blocked while in "demo" mode. I navigated my way to the standard sidebar 1 scriptlet and pasted in the info from the last post on the thread you linked above, clicked save, and the refreshed the product page. No change. I then went back to the admin to confirm that I pasted in the correct code and it was back to the code that was present before my paste and save. I tried again with no luck. Apparently there is no way to make this happen in demo mode.

Guess I'll have to find out how to make it happen if/when we decide that AC7 is our package of choice.

- Jeff

[jmestep]

When you edit something like the standard sidebar scriplet in the admin, it puts your edited copy in the custom folder instead of the default folder. Then to use it, you need to use [[ConLib:Custom/whatevescriplet]]