Magento: Display Categories in Sidebar
It seems my posts lately are always in relation to solving a problem or answering a question for someone else. If you’re looking for a way to display categories in the sidebar, change category display, or create a category menu then this post is probably for you.
Creating the Block
The first thing you need to do is create a block in your layout. Navigate to /app/design/frontend/default/default/layout/catalog.xml
The first thing in your layout is a definition of the default layout noted by the comment “Default layout, loads most of the pages” depending on where you want to put your category nav (right sidebar, left sidebar, footer, etc) you’ll need to define the block a little differently. I’m going to do it with the left sidebar so you see what’s going on.
<reference name="left"> <block type="catalog/navigation" name="catalog.leftnav" template="catalog/navigation/left_nav.phtml" /> </reference>
Okay, so what i did was locate the left sidebar which is referenced simply as “left” inside those tags i define my block type and template. The next thing you’ll want to do is create that template file, note that i defined it within /app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/navigation/left_nav.phtml so i will need to create that file.
Creating the Template
Once I’ve created the file, it’s time to put in my code to populate my links automatically of all my categories:
<h2>Browse</h2> <div class="block"> <ul id="nav_category" class="nav_category"> <?php foreach ($this->getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?> <?php echo $this->drawItem($_category) ?> <?php endforeach ?> </ul> </div> <?php echo $this->getChildHtml('topLeftLinks') ?>
If you want to take this a step further, you can target subcategories based on current page with this little script (via Pratthost
<?php $obj = new Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation(); $store_cats = $obj->getStoreCategories(); $current_cat = $obj->getCurrentCategory(); $current_cat = (is_object($current_cat) ? $current_cat->getName() : ''); foreach ($store_cats as $cat) { if ($cat->getName() == $current_cat) { echo '<li class="current"><a href="'.$this->getCategoryUrl($cat).'">'.$cat->getName()."</a>\n<ul>\n"; foreach ($obj->getCurrentChildCategories() as $subcat) { echo '<li><a href="'.$this->getCategoryUrl($subcat).'">'.$subcat->getName()."</a></li>\n"; } echo "</ul>\n</li>\n"; } else { echo '<li><a href="'.$this->getCategoryUrl($cat).'">'.$cat->getName()."</a></li>\n"; } } ?>
Now refresh the cache and you should be set!
Was working through this, and stumbled across an easier way.
There’s already a template that does the work – catalog/navigation/left.phtml.
Enabling that in the layout shows the subcategories of the current category.
i have done the same but my catalog.xml file dont showing the content i manually added in there
can u help me how to show categories in left sidebar as i have added new block from cms and the contents are showing in front
so can i write soem code in cms in that static block that will show categories in left.
thanks
Thank you! I needed to override Magento from displaying the categories in the side bar only when at the top level, but disappearing in a filter-like manner once you were in one category. We didn’t want customers to have to hit back to switch categories. This was very helpful! Thanks.
saya sudah melakukan instruksi di atas. template tampil di depan, tetapi category tidak tampil . apakah ada yang salah?
I’ve done the above instructions. template to appear in front, but the category did not appear. whether there is something wrong?
Thanks for help, It’s working fine
Thanks for help, It’s working fine, but categories URLs don’t work properly.
please solved them out.
this is not for adding a navigation menu on the left .
This tutorial adds a second layered navigation block to the shop.
It is exactly the same as already displayed on my page .
Rather useless
I never said anything about second navigation, I claimed it added categories to the sidebar, which prior to 1.4 was a fairly tedious.
I am also having problems getting the URLs, my href is blank: href=”"
For those have trouble with getting links to show up properly:
Instead of:
[code]
echo 'getCategoryUrl($cat).'">'.$cat->getName()."\n";
[/code]
Use:
[code]
echo 'getCategoryUrl($cat).'">'.$cat->getName()."\n";
[/code]
Ok, well that didn’t display properly at all. Anyway, if you’re having trouble getting your links to work properly using this code, change $this-> in the link creation section to $obj->