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CategoriesCategories | Categories Manager | Dynamic Menus CategoriesYou should ideally define your categorisation scheme first, before you start adding products and content... Your category structure is like the skeleton of your website. Categories can have an associated image, and up to 64Kb of text or HTML in the Full Description field, so you can use this to create your own dynamic website - completely within O3 (and without using O3's Content Management module). In O3, you can add products to any category in the hierarchy (not just the end categories). With the CM module, you can add content items anywhere in the hierarchy too, and with the planned list-management system, your members will be able to add their own items in there too. O3's catalog page uses the category structure to display pages of the category, product and content information you define. It does it all automatically, the only things you may need to change are the Containers used to display the various items. See the page on the Catalog for more info on Containers. Categories ManagerYou can create a hierarchical tree of categories to assign your products, content, and list items to. This is done in the Categories Manager. There can be any number of categories and levels, and the manager has some useful tools in the Filter to help you find the ones you want. If you click on the 'New Category' button in the top-right, a new root-level category will be created. If you click on the 'New Sub-Category' button below the current category's details, a new sub-category will be created. This is how you build up the category structure... You can also move, copy and delete entire trees of categories easily. Just select the one you want then click on the button. If you're moving or copying, you must specify where to move or copy to. Content ManagementThe catalog page can display any mixture of products, content and list-items within the category structure you create - using the containers you create. It's up to you how you mix these things. You might prefer to keep content and products in separate branches, or in the same ones... Categories have a Full Description field, which is up to 64Kb of text or HTML. You can use this feature alone to provide a hierarchy of web pages - just put the page content into the Full Description field. Ensure it's output by putting the CT-FULLDESC macro in the container. The examples you get with O3 do all this - you can just copy them. ProductsCategories are assigned to products in the Products Manager page. The Catalog Page uses the functions described on this page to allow users to navigate around the structure you create - automatically - without you having to create any static web pages. Dynamic MenusIf you want, you can get O3 to generate your menus dynamically too. There are two ways to do it: Using the show_categories functionThis function shows all the sub categories of the supplied category in the specified container. The Gadget House example does this. It uses the following code to display the menu of root-level categories:
This uses a special container called 'CategoriesMenu' to format the list of categories. It's a really simple container, with just an image and a link. You can use this as an example to create your own containers for your dynamic menus. Creating containers is easy, you just cut & paste the template HTML into O3's container's manager, then replace the specific stuff with O3's symbols like 'CT-NAME' - see below for more info You can create lists of products, or content in the same way: Create a simple menu container for each type, then run the appropriate O3 function for the type of data. (i.e. show_products, show_contents - see the section on functions) Site Map / Tree MenuO3 contains a function to create a complete site map, or hierarchical menu of the whole, or part of the category structure.
To see an example of this function in action - go to the Demo Website - Site Map. The menu uses the Menu container, defined in the settings, by default. You can override this when you call the function. The menu container can contain it's own set of macros. Here they are:
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