Subcategories and products, different views

I have a question regarding the view of products depending on the way you click your way to that category.

For example, I have some categories at the root of my shop, those categories are shown as a list.
When I click on those categories I get the same view as per the settings in the Associated Module. But is there a way to make this view different depending on the way I have set up the menus. For one category I have a 3column view and for others I have simple list views depending on the type of products.

Going through the menus I get the look I want but it is different if I go over the category listing.

Thanks

Jan

Yes I have set up a few variants of the template depending on category.

My menu tree is more or less the same as my category tree.

The difference I see is when I from the meny select just a category, then the subcategories are displayed as a list. If I now select one of the subcategories from the list I get a different product list view than if I would have gone through the menu tree to this subcategory.

This is how it looks from the menu selection

I am still struggling with the view of products. Going through my menu everything looks as I want and the different categories have the views I have set up. Some has DIV with images and some are Listviews without images. So far so good.

My problem is when I select the webshop from the menu. Then I ge a list of all root categories, that is OK. Now if I click on one of the listed categories I get a product view that are from the settings of the root category "Webshop" In my case DIV 3 Columns. One other thing is that the category name is no longer diplayed at the top, it just says "Webshop". I have tried several settings and no matter what I set in the category settings, it is the setting from the root category (i.e. Webshop) that rules or override any setting in my subcategories.

If I now click on a product in the categorydisplay I get everything as is should be and it looks the same as if I came through the menus.

What is it that makes this behavior? And why is the root category overriding the subcategory settings? Have I missed somehting and why is it working over the menues and not from the categorylistings.

Jan

Investigating this some more I can see that I have totally different URL's to reach these two different views of the same category listing.

The one I get going through the menus is:
index.php?option=com_hikashop&view=product&layout=listing&Itemid=180

But clicking on the category listings from the Webshop root to show the category gives this URL:
index.php?option=com_hikashop&ctrl=category&task=listing&cid=36&name=efi-semimatt&Itemid=114

The category in question has the ID 36 and I can find ID 114 in two places, first the Webshop Root has ID 114 and I think this is the reason why if I change the layout settings for the Webshop Root this category gets that setting. I have also found that another category has ID 114 as a module, but that is not in play here ( I think)

In the first example ID 180 is the Menu ID for that menu item to reach this product listing.


I really need to solve this and to be able to control the layout in both scenarios, the customer can go both ways to reach a product listing and to have two different view is really confusing.

Why can't I control this on category level, and why isn't there any way to select a layout or an HTML override at Category settings?

Please advise!

Jan

I did try what you suggested here: www.hikashop.com/en/forum/4-how-to/41761...category-layout.html but that didn't do any difference.

To make it more complicated ( or interesting ) is that this behavior depends on where you come from in the structure of the shop.

If I for example go through the menu to the desired category listing:
index.php?option=com_hikashop&view=product&layout=listing&Itemid=180

Then I go back through the breadcrumbs to the category above and then get the category listing. Now this listing has a different sort order ( ?? ) and if I now select the category I want I get the correct view, but it is because I have a another URL for this listing:
index.php?option=com_hikashop&ctrl=category&task=listing&cid=36&name=efi-semimatt&Itemid=115
Note that the itemID for the root ( not really the root but where I went down the branch) now is 115 and that category setting has the List view defined in its settings.


Jan

To make an easy workaround I made an Joomla article page for the webshop root with links to each subcategory. That makes it a little closer to what I want for the moment.

I just had to get it live and it now is at www.colorconsult.se

I will try your suggestion with a custom field and see what happens.

Now you can go back to work on future versions

Thanks

Jan