[ic] [how] products/categories.html, proposal (?)

Mon Sep 17 19:33:01 2001

On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 05:52:30PM -0500, Eduardo Dominguez wrote:
> 
> I cant use the normal Cat/Subcat via bar_link sub because the list
> its pretty big. Reducing this list its just not possible. 
> 
> What I am trying to do is create a categories.html, so that I always
> display categories on my left menu and when clicking on one I get
> the subcats displayed on the main content area. 
> 
> Has anyone done something similar ? Isnt this functionality
> common so that it justifies a categories.html ? Categories dont seem to
> do much on Interchange other than grouping subcats. They are not
> clickable. 
> 
> What I am currently doing involves a loop thru the categories
> and creates a link to categories.html&catcode=CATCODEHERE, which
> retrieves the subcats with description and displays them.
> 
> Any ideas or experiences with this layout are appreciated. If
> anyone is interested I can post more details on how I achieve that.

We do it like that too.  Yes, the layout and concept work fine for 
catalogs.  Conceptually, however, it stands IC on its head; categories 
become structurally the most important item.

That in and of itself creates a **huge** issue that IC
avoids: how do you make sensible categories?  Ultimately
we just imported DMOZ for our category structure.  Let someone
smarter than us do the librarian work.  :-)

I've not a clue about how to do it in IC markup but we've 
done it in perl, largely outside of minivend/IC.  We do lots
of background work and "pre-cooking".  IC is very 
"self-sufficient" and self contained and not really well
suited for that.  perl/DBI is.

You might want to look back in the archives maybe a year back
there was a thread on various ways to support multiple/arbitrary
layers of categories.  On a single catalog basis you can go
quite far with a number of the solutions.

cfm

> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 

Christopher F. Miller, Publisher                               cfm@maine.com
MaineStreet Communications, Inc           208 Portland Road, Gray, ME  04039
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