How to display grid of categories, NOT grid of catg products

[ZLA]

My client wants customers to navigate to items by clicking on categories and sometimes sub-categories before displaying the normal category grid showing the products with their thumbnails. I have two examples:

Example 1: The home page will show a grid of popular categories. Clicking on a popular category will display the normal category grid of the items in that category.

Example 2: The home page has a link on it for Kid Gifts. Clicking on the link will display a grid of categories containing products associated with Kid Gifts. Fa or example, the Puzzle category and the Stool category. Clicking on one of these categories will display all those product items in that category that is associated with Kid Gifts. Note that the Puzzle and Stool categories contain other products that are not associated with Kid Gifts.

I realize I'll have to write to write custom code for this, but I was hoping to start from an existing grid of category thumbnails.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

P.S. I also need to figure out some way to define which items are associated with Kid Gifts. I suppose I could use Keywords but I don't think that is really their purpose. Can I just use a product template and add a merchant field which will be populated with Kid Gifts, Adult Gifts, etc. and use that to select the appropriate catalog / products?

[mazhar]

Have a look at the Category Details Page available for category listing, hopefully it will help you a lot. Have a look at following link to view the screen shots of different category controls
http://help.ablecommerce.com/mergedProj ... ptlets.htm

[ZLA]

Perfect. That's much more helpful than simple text descriptions in the conlib reference.

[William M]

ZLA. If you are doing something like what's shown below, please let me know how you went about it. I'm interested in doing the same thing.

Thanks.

[mazhar]

I think Category Details page is doing almost very same thing.

[ZLA]

I think Category Details page is doing almost very same thing.

William M, Mazhar is correct. If you edit the home page and select Category Details for the content region, it will display something similar to what you're looking for.

Mazhar, my plan is to copy Category Details and modify it to get the layout I want and also to change the underlying data being pulled. A couple of quick questions:

1) Is my plan reasonable?
2) Are there built in Data Access methods that might make this more streamlined?
2b) Is there a reference for the various [Object]DataSource methods such as ProductDataSource.GetPopularProductsByCategory and CatalogDataSource.LoadForCategory?

Thanks as always.

[mazhar]

1) Is my plan reasonable?

Regarding your plan yes it sounds good, it would be better to create duplicate control in ConLib/Custom folder. Now it would be accessible in scriptlets something like [[ConLib:Custom\CustomCategoryDetailsPage]]

2) Are there built in Data Access methods that might make this more streamlined?

Yep you will found many helpful methods

2b) Is there a reference for the various [Object]DataSource methods such as ProductDataSource.GetPopularProductsByCategory and CatalogDataSource.LoadForCategory?

Please have a look at following topics about your DAL etc
Also you can download API help file from here
ftp://ftp.ablecommerce.com/evals/Commer ... 7_Help.zip
http://wiki.ablecommerce.com/index.php/ ... uilder_API

[ZLA]

[quote="mazhar]Also you can download API help file from here
ftp://ftp.ablecommerce.com/evals/Commer ... 7_Help.zip
http://wiki.ablecommerce.com/index.php/ ... uilder_API[/quote]

When I open the help file, I get the breakdown of all the namespaces and methods in the index but there isn't any content for any topic. The topic page just says:

The address is not valid
Most likely causes:
There might be a typing error in the address.
If you clicked on a link, it may be out of date.
What you can try:
Retype the address.
Go back to the previous page.

I'm using Windows XP Pro. Thanks.