Thread: Left Menu Display

Has anybody rearranged how the Manufacturers are displayed in the left toolbar? We have a long list of manufacturers and would like to only list about 10 of them and then have a link that says "More..." that takes you to the manufacturer page if clicked on to display the rest of the manufacturers. I am not used to editing XML packages and have no idea how I would even start to try and do this. If anybody has done anything similar to this and doesn't mind sharing the XML package they created to do this it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help provided!

We are using version ML 9.0.1.2

Has anyone been able to figure this out yet and/or are doing something similar? I could really use and would appreciate any help. Thanks.

I have some ideas and have some posted other threads on how to modify the menu. I need to eventually do this for my site too and will update this thread when I finish it on my site.

Thank you. That would be great.

Has anyone had any luck with this? I can't seem to figure it out.

I'm making progress on this, but it is a low priority item in my development. I'll post when I get it working right.

wrap that menu in a css tag and set overflow to auto. ( overflow: auto; )

as far as a "more... " listing, you just need to change the rev.manufacturers.xml.config template with a bunch of xsl:choose or xsl:if statements.

Because editing templates can drive you mad, it's orders of magnitude simpler just to create an ASCX control and drop it in your template.ascx file and replace the side menu altogether. The only new issue is you need to either create your own datasource (not requiring source) or if you have the sourcecode, just tap into the data retrieval functions there. Make sure to use cache-ing (you can do this with all the data sources in DotNet 2.0 and above).
I got a 15% speed boost by bypassing the template parser (and saved some memory to boot!) on the side menus.

I'm referring to version 8

@cjbarth - have you made any progress on this?
Greatly appreciated!

No I haven't. It is still on my list though, there are just some other projects that are higher priority. Thanks for the bump as a reminder that I need to post here when I get it working.

Hi @cjbarth...have you made any progress on this issue?
If not do you have a time frame?
Thanks for the help in advance.

I haven't made any progress, but I might be soon as I just got a new task list from my manager. Perhaps two weeks? However, I wouldn't count on that as my task list tends to change frequently.

Sounds good...thanks for the update. If you don't mind I will follow up again sometime in march.

@cjbarth - just following up as discussed to see if you have made any progress with this?
Thanks in advance!

You might see this thread and see if that helps. I haven't done anything on this yet and i probably won't be if this other thread works.

http://forums.aspdotnetstorefront.co...enu-Xmlpackage

http://www.ecommercecartmods.com/p-7...torefront.aspx

UPDATE: This company mislead me to believe what their menu could do.

I've implemented the functionality for displaying the most populous manufacturers and categories on the menu. I did it by modifying the SQL in ProductMappingLinkItem.vb in the GetAllFirstLevel routine. For those that know SQL this is a very easy change.

In order to fine-tune the menu without always writing new code I created two AppConfig values. They specify how many of the items show up.

I wrote my SQL to check how often a specific category or manufacturer was used in products, but you can also check the log to see what the most frequently accessed categories and manufacturers are, though that might be a self-propagating situation due to people accessing the items on the menu first and thereby reinforcing their popularity.

Also, there is no noticeable reduction in speed for using this feature, even on my slow test virtual machine. I have over 10,000 products.