November Happy Hour will be moved to Thursday December 5th.

Developing Top Level Category Menu structure

Vote:
 

Hi,

I'm working on a client project and I want to ease the creation/managing of new top level categories within the EPiServer CMS. Our current implementation to display a new category on the website would involve the following:

  • Add new top level category to the catalog and upload through Commerce manager
  • Go into the CMS and create a new Category link placeholder page (this allows the category to appear in the top site menu)
  • Staying within the CMS create a new Category Listing page pointing to the appropriate category in the catalog and also any custom content specific to the category (i.e. CMS links, Promo images etc etc)

To me this seems a rather overly complex solution with an excess of steps for the client to carry out. I've looked at trying to generate the top level category menu dynamically via code but this presents a number of issues. Namely:

  • How do I get the URL link for the category (currently this is obtained via a property on my Category Link page pointing to the catagory page)
  • How do I retrieve category specific CMS content so that I can display it along side the catalog category data (currently this is obtained via a property on my Category link page pointing to the specific CMS links in the treeview)


To summarise I want to be able to dynamically generate my website headermenu from the catalog structure whilst being able to incorporate category specific CMS content.

Thanks in advance

Ben

#59009
May 15, 2012 17:30
Vote:
 

UPDATE: the simplest solution to this problem would appear to be to extend the catalog data and provide the additional information as part of the catalog. However if category specific CMS links were supplied in the catalog data this would then require maintenance in 2 places (the CMS treeview structure and the catalog data) when for example a new link is required.


Thanks

Ben

#59020
May 16, 2012 11:36
This topic was created over six months ago and has been resolved. If you have a similar question, please create a new topic and refer to this one.
* You are NOT allowed to include any hyperlinks in the post because your account hasn't associated to your company. User profile should be updated.