Multiple Product Dropdowns

Here are the menu choices currently:

* Home
* Products
o Search
o Show All Products
o Canvas
o Landscapes
o Framed Art
o Fine Art
o Mixed Media
o Driftwood
o Shells
o Greeting Cards
o B&W
o Animals
o Floral
o Architecture
* Support
o Ordering
o Shipping
o Returns
o Order History
* About Us
* Contact Us

What I'd like is:

* Home
* Artwork
o Search
o Show All Products
o Fine Art
o Mixed Media
o Driftwood
o Shells
o Greeting Cards
* Photography
o Search
o Show All Products
o B&W
o Color
o Animals
o Floral
o Architecture
o Landscapes
* Product Types
o Search
o Show All Products
o Prints
o Framed Art
o Canvas
* Support
o Ordering
o Shipping
o Returns
o Order History
* About Us
* Contact Us

How would I go about duplicating the products dropdown and then have the categories show up in the right dropdown? I have all your products, but really don't want to mess this up. Any help would be great. I'm doing this one for my sister so I'd like it towork the way she wants it.

Damon

You can duplicate the products menu by going into your CSSMenuWriter > cssmw_home > menu.php file. In here you can just copy the products <li> entry, it should start on line 56 and go to line 76.

If you copy this code and paste it just after this <li> you will have a duplicate entry for the products in your menu. You can change products to say Art.

If you add in another entry you will also need to adjust your widths on the menu to include this new entry. In the menu.css on line 52 you have the css for this. You will need to adjust the width, if I made it an even 100px it seemed to fit just fine.

menu.css line 52

ul#cssmw_home > li > span > a {
background-image:none;
color:#FFFFFF;
display:block;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size:14px;
font-style:normal;
font-weight:normal;
height:24px;
margin:5px 0 0;
padding-top:12px;
text-align:center;
text-decoration:none;
width:100px; /* I updated this width to accommodate the extra entry */
}

If you want to alter what products are listed in the menu you will need to modify the query for the recordset that is pulling these results. You will need to update it so that it selects only the records you are looking for.

OK I did that. Now would you be kind enough to explain how to modify the admin section so that I can choose which main category each product goes in? Also what do I have to do to modify the database? I've been looking at it but don't want to mess it up. Thank you

The current menu listing that you see if just a simple selection of all the categories and the items in those categories. If you want this art menu option to contain only certain categories then you will need to alter the recordset that is in this this part of the menu. You will need to modify to filter on the categories you would like to display.

There are other ways this can be accomplished but they are all a bit more advanced and will require some custom coding and db administration to incorporate into your admin area. For example if you added another column to the categories table to indicate if it were art or not then you would need to update the admin pages to be able to record this value and store in the table. You would then need to go and alter the recordset code on the that part of the menu to filter where the category is art and you would need to modify the other one to exclude these categories.

Ok so I added 3 product drop downs. ArtWork, Photography and Product Types. I renamed the record sets, every thing works I get 3 matching menus. I open the first recordset and I have the following:

SELECT CategoryName, CategoryID
FROM productcategories
WHERE productcategories.CategoryID=4 OR productcategories.CategoryID=1

when I view the page only Category 1 shows up in the menu. What am I doing wrong?

Your query looks like it should be returning results for both of these categories. Have you tested this query to confirm that it returns the results you are looking for?

If so please post back with the page in question that you have this code implemented on and I will take a look to see if I can spot any problems.