How can I let a customer drill down through subcategories?

[SteveHiner]

I have a main category called printer supplies. Under that category I have different printers listed. Under each printer I have the supplies for that printer. Basically it looks kinda like this:

Mfg1 Printer Supplies
> Printer Model 1
> > Ribbons
> > > Ribbon Product 1
> > > Ribbon Product 2
> > Paper
> > > Paper Product 1
> > Cleaning Kits

> Printer Model 2
> > Ribbons
> > > Ribbon Product 3
> > > Ribbon Product 4
> > Paper
> > > Paper Product 2
> > Cleaning Kits

(I hope that reproduces well enough in the post to be understandable)

When the customer clicks on "Mfg1 Printer Supplies" in my left nav bar I'd like them to get a page listing the sub-categories (printer) contained within that category but not have any products listed. I'd like them to be in a grid with the pictures assigned to each category.

Then when the click a printer they'd get a list of subcategories under that but this time it would list the products under each subcategory.

From what I can tell the Category Grid (Deep Item Display) template will work for the final level since I do want the products shown but so far I don't see a Display Page type that will show just the sub-categories without showing products under them. Did I miss it? It seems like the kind of thing that would be used so I thought I'd find it in there by default.

I don't mind making a custom page that will do it. I doubt it's very hard considering it's mostly removing features from of an existing page template. I just don't want to start making a new custom page if there's one that will already do what I need.

Any advice?

[AbleMods]

Steve, i think I know what you want. Take a look a my site http://www.Solunar.com and click the Hunting Gear link under the Solunar Store menu on the left side.

From there, you'll see various sub-categories as images. Clicking any image takes you yet another sub-category with yet more images. From there any image click will take you to the actual products for the sub-sub-category.

I think this is actually one level "deeper" than what you're looking for but I believe it is as you described, correct? The Fishing Gear link might be more what you're looking for...it's one level "less deep" than the Hunting Gear category.

If that's what you want, you just need to set your category display page to use CategoryGrid4. You'll get stuck with the product summary being displayed for each one but I can tell you how to easily remove it if you need to...just let me know.

[SteveHiner]

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks.

I will work on that a bit today and I'll let you know if I need any help with the other issue you brought up.

By the way, your web site doesn't work at all through IE on my XP system. It works fine through FireFox but IE gets a a server error. I thought at first it was due to the fact that I have scripting turned off in IE but even after adding your site to my trusted sites list I still get the following error. I know it doesn't have any useful information in it since you wisely don't allow exceptions to go to remote systems. Let me know if I can help figure out what's going on. I'd hate to think you've got potential customers thinking your site is down.

Server Error in '/' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".


<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="Off"/>
</system.web>
</configuration>


Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's <customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.


<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="mycustompage.htm"/>
</system.web>
</configuration>

[AbleMods]

Well I appreciate the heads-up on the error message you are receiving. By chance could you PM me your IP address so I can track down the event log errors?

I get many orders a day and have never seen the message you posted - my staff and I all use IE6/IE7. But still I want to research it further and I do appreciate you taking the time to mention it. Bad home page mojo makes for bad visitor mojo

[SteveHiner]

I sent you my IP address. Let me know if you don't get it. I'm not too familiar with phpBB's PM system. Right now my reply is sitting in the Outbox rather than the Sent Items folder so I don't know if it actually sent it or not.