Displaying category listing in a sidebar

I am having difficulty achieving something that should be very simple. I want to have a sidebar with product category listings as in the screenshot attached.

I know in Hikashop I can create a menu item that is a category listing, and if I select that to display as a list I get something like what I want,


but I can't see how to make that appear in a Joomla sidebar module position. I have tried creating a Joomla module and making that of type menu, and then selecting the menu I have created with the Hikashop category listing but there doesn't seem to be a way to show all the subcategories


and if I click on "product categories" it just takes me to a new page as capture 2.

Thank you for your help,

Ian

Ok I've got it now, I think, I didn't need the menu in a module I can just create a Hikashop module that is a category listing.

Ian

Thank you for the reply Nicolas.

I have to take issue with your use of the word simple, Hikashop is brilliant in many respects, and your support is always first rate, but managing the display of products is the most complex and frustrating thing I've come across in eight years of making a living out of e-commerce sites built on Joomla, and I still don't have this working the way I would expect it to.

Hey ho, onwards and upwards.

Hello,

I still don't have this working the way I would expect it to.

Can you give us more information about what do you have and what do you exactly want.

I have it sorted now thank you Mohammed.

What I wanted to achieve is pretty much illustrated in my first post, I was able to get the category listing in a sidebar but not able to get through to product listings in any meaningful way. I had every permutation from products showing but without the category description, category description showing without the products, problems getting the page title to show and the breadcrumb path right.

Basically to do this I have to create a Joomla module configured correctly with the right Hikashop variation, then configure the Hikashop part of that module, then the menu item listing that goes along with that (if you can identify which one it is out of the dozens that seem to be generated). I also have to figure out whether I do or don't need an associated product listing module.

In all that lot there are at least two places where you can set the page title and turn it on or off, and you have to work out that one of those page titles appears in the breadcrumb path.

Despite that and the plethora of options in all of those settings I still have to do some custom css to make it look right.

All I've had to do with other shopping carts I've used is configure and publish a Category listing module - job done.

Admittedly you have a very powerful and flexible system, but it's not intuitive by any means, partly because you often divert from the standard joomla way of doing things (like the module within a module and the lack of tool tips for example).

That's my view any way!

Best regards,

Ian

Hi Jerome,

Thank you for responding so positively to my comments.

The fundamental difficulty I have is the architecture of Hikashop that attaches the display characteristics to the link to a product, rather than the product. This has some advantages (you can display the same product in lots of different ways) but also disadvantages in that you have to configure product display for every route to that product.

I am using hikashop to replace this site: Artist Papers , which I built a several years ago using Virtuemart.

You'll see I have a "Shop" menu item on the main menu bar, this I had to manually construct but it is just links to the appropriate product category pages. The "Shop" item itself is a link to the Virtuemart component and the rest are URL's to the product pages. The display characteristics for the product pages are determined by templates configured at product category level which cascade down, so if you define a template for a category it applies to sub categories as well, unless over ridden.

I also have the Virtuemart module mod_product_categories in the left column, this has very few parameters to configure and a bit of css tweaking but again just links to the product pages.

The screen shot shows where I am up to with Hikashop.

I have the same menu bar which is manually created but this time each menu item is a Hikashop module which has the potential to be misconfigured. If I put a category listing item on the menu as "shop" clicking on it directs me to a new page with the categories which is not what I want. It would be nice if there was a display option "category listing as a drop down" to make this a simple one step option.

Also I have a pull out sidebar which is a hikashop content module, (I haven't done any styling on this yet). I can't describe how I have configured this exactly because I can't remember, and this is the problem as it's so convoluted, but I have a configuration page for the module and then there is an associated menu item page to configure and no obvious connection between the two.

It works, eventually!

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Ian

Hi Jerome,

What you propose would be useful to me as I would like to show the category list fully expanded as in my original site.

Many thanks,

Ian