Topic: show category and subcategory

[mboumans]

Hi Kenmcd,

I totally agree with your ideas. With these changes SOBI will make a hugh step forward in SEO and usability. But it is one of my favourites anyway .... 

Since I'm not a programmer I cannot help you with this, so I will sit and wait patiently.

[kai920]

2. This hack displays the category at the top of the v-card template.
SOLUTION] Displaying category name instead of component name at category view page?
http://www.sigsiu.net/forum/index.php/topic,9229.msg43492.html#msg43492

Drawbacks:
 - does not display on category pages without entries displayed in v-cards
 - displays below the sub-categories
 - usability issues
 - accessibility issues
 - SEO issues

Just want to point out another potential drawback - I encountered some javascript errors with IE6 and 7 with this. (Think i posted a bit about it afterwards)

[mboumans]

@kenmcd

Of course I can do some testing or whatever I can do to help you; let me know! Just saw that my answer looked very passive .... But I am willing to put some time in, just can't write code.

cheers

[kenmcd]

@kenmcd

Of course I can do some testing or whatever I can do to help you; let me know! Just saw that my answer looked very passive .... But I am willing to put some time in, just can't write code.

cheers

Progress so far:
 - added the Categories/Sub-Categories and Listings sub-headings.
 - added strings to the language file for translation.
 - added switches to the Registry to enable the user to turn-off these sub-heading displays.
Seems to work properly with the SOBI2 cache.
 
After doing the above changes, I set this aside to work on some other issues.
Still need to either add text such as "there are no listings in this category" or
simply make the sub-headings not display on those pages.
Or a combination of the two.
From a usability perspective I think the text "there are no listings in this category"
is better because it is a positive display which is unambiguous.
Simply leaving a blank is not as helpful to an end-user.
It might even be better to have "there are xx listings in this category" and always display this text.

While doing this I got to thinking about doing future SOBI upgrades and what a PITA it will
be to always have to merge these basic usability hacks over and over for every update.
And there are other things I would like to change or move on the mainpage/category pages.
So I am looking at moving this all to a custom function which would be easier to maintain.
This way it may even be possible to have a Mainpage/Category View Template.
But this will take more time to learn more, etc., etc.

As I said before, I am just learning PHP so it takes me longer than if I knew PHP well and SOBI2 itself well.
After I finally got a handle on how SOBI2 is constructing the pages and added the sub-headings
it made me wonder why this is has been such a big deal.
Someone who knew both PHP and SOBI2 well could have done in hours what took me days.
 
 

[~GW~]

Not sure if this helps but I added these two lines of code to my frontend.class.php file and all works for me

Code: [Select]

if( $config->key( "frontpage", "catlist_browser_title_add_cats", true ) && isset($cat->name)) {
$this->sobi2Header = $this->sobi2Header."\n\t<h2>{$cat->name}</h2>";}
Add this after

Code: [Select]

$msg = sobi2Config::request( $_REQUEST, "mosmsg", null);
$msg = $msg ? "<div id=\"sobimsg\" class=\"message\">{$msg}</div>" : null;
$this->sobi2Header = $this->sobi2Header."\n\t</tr>\n</table>\n\n{$msg}\n\n";
You can see it working here - http://dogsites.com.au/breeders-directory/breeds-a/affenpinscher-2.html

Cheers

Greg

[metabo_man]

hello Mboumans, hello to everyone -

First of all i wish you all a Happy New Year!

i am new to SOBI, i love to learn from helping others - and from trying to understand what problems others have.... and how to fix.

Already saw this solution. It does show categories and subcategories BUT not on an EMPTY category. Since I'm starting up a rather large database I've loads of empty categories so people do not see where they are at once .....

That sounds interesting - you want to start a page with lots of entries - and you populate the db first...
It sounds good. Can u explain a bit more...


thx in advance

metabo

[mboumans]

@ gwmbox: that's indeed what I was thinking about. For the time beeing this is very ok! >> Thanks!

@ kenmcd: Hope someone can help you

@ metabo: problem is pointed out above, Kenmcd has some very good input.

Metabo maybe you can help kenmcd?

Really wish I could do something but sit and wait ... .

[Continuum]

what about using breadcrumbs?

It works for me.