[ic] navigation using categories and subcategories

[Bob Ramstad]

Hi there.  Some folks with excellent memories might recognize my email
address... I had attempted back in early 2002 to learn Interchange and
migrate to it, but got so frustrated with the process that I gave up.

Apparently I just can't get enough abuse (!) so I'm back...  LOL.

I've reviewed the materials for building tables to drive off trees,
using categories and subcategories, and I'm completely baffled.

I've also looked at the admin materials for menu creation, and while
that looks slick, I can't get it to *do* anything.  Ergo, I generate a
menu in the foundation demo, click Publish, Apply, Apply Changes,
restart Interchange, and nothing happens except for the data being
written to include/menus/Untitled.txt.

I'm running 5.2.0 if that is helpful.

This wouldn't be the first time for me that the foundation demo left
me more confused than anything else.

My goal is to have a relatively simple navigation structure, using
categories and subcategories on the left.  Initially, a page would
show just a list of categories there.  If a user clicks on one of the
categories, the name of that category would be highlighted in bold and
expand and display subcategories for that category underneath, and
also display information about that category in the main body.  If the
user clicks on a subcategory, the subcategory is also highlighted, and
the information for the subcategory plus the items in the subcategory
would be displayed in the main body.

IMHO, this should be super easy, but I can't figure out for the life
of me how to convert the 5.2.0 demo -- which uses a totally different
navigation scheme -- into doing something like this.  I can get the
menu builder to spit out Untitled.txt which appears to be a data
structure that tree tags could be used with, but I don't understand
what needs to be modified to use this data for navigation.

As with my previous foray with 4.8.2, I distinctly wonder if
foundation just isn't way way way too full featured for me and other
beginners.  My needs strike me as quite simple.  (Isn't that what
everyone thinks?)  I am quite paranoid about tampering with the order
/ checkout process and so I want to build off foundation, but
everything is so tightly lumped together I have no idea if something I
change will break the ordering process or not...

If anyone out there has built something like this, and can help me
keep from reinventing the wheel, please please please share your
wisdom.  I've spent most of the day searching the Interchange archives
and having absolutely no luck.

BTW, I bug I reported two years ago is still there... when running
makecat, if you provide something other than /var/www/html as the
DocumentRoot, for whatever weird reason, interchange-5 is still copied
to /var/www/html, and so all the Admin Interface graphics are broken.

-- Bob