Category display

Hi,

The HikaShop module (Type of content: Categories) lists the sub-categories of one main category you pick. So it can only show categories that share the same parent, it has no option to hand-pick categories from different branches of your tree.

To get your own selection you have two ways:

1) Bring them under one parent. Create a category to act as the container, then change the parent of each category you want to feature so they sit under it (drag and drop in the Categories page, or set the parent in each category's edit form). This does not move or unlink your products, they stay in their categories. Then point the module at that container and it lists exactly your selection. This gives you the normal HikaShop category tiles with images.

2) Leave the categories where they are and build the list by hand. Add a Joomla "Custom" (Custom HTML) module and put a link, and an image if you want, to each chosen category in it. More manual, but nothing in your category tree changes.

If the featured categories can live together, option 1 is the cleaner one. If they must stay spread across your tree, option 2 is the way.
On our end, we'll look at what we can do to allow for this in the future as I think this would be great to allow more flexibility here.

As I said yesterday, we'll look into this. In fact, I've already looked into it before reading your message today and I've made some improvements to allow for it. So you just have to wait for the next release if the alternatives I propose do not meet your needs.

Hi,

For products you can easily do it. Create an unpublished category, configure the HikaShop content module to display the products of that category, and add the category to the products you wish to display in that module.

Hi,

The category image is not a column on the category table, which is why your module can read every field except the image. Images are stored in a separate table (hikashop_file), one row per image, linked to the category with file_type = 'category' and file_ref_id = the category id. A category can have several images.

So you have two options.

1) Let the category class attach the image for you. When you load the categories through HikaShop's category class, pass its "category_image" argument as true, and each row then carries file_path (plus file_name and file_description):

$categoryClass = hikashop_get('class.category');
// getChildren($parentId, $all, $filters, $order, $start, $limit, $category_image = true)
$categories = $categoryClass->getChildren($parentId, false, array(), '', 0, 100, true);

$db = JFactory::getDbo();
$db->setQuery('SELECT file_ref_id, file_path, file_name, file_description FROM '.hikashop_table('file').
	' WHERE file_type = '.$db->quote('category').' AND file_ref_id IN ('.implode(',', $ids).') ORDER BY file_ordering ASC');
$images = $db->loadObjectList('file_ref_id'); // keyed by category id
// $images[$categoryId]->file_path is the image path of that category

$image = hikashop_get('helper.image');
$options = array('default' => true, 'forcesize' => true, 'scale' => 'inside');
$thumb = $image->getThumbnail($cat->file_path, array('width' => $image->main_thumbnail_x, 'height' => $image->main_thumbnail_y), $options);
echo $image->renderImgFrom($thumb, array('class' => 'hikashop_category_image', 'alt' => $cat->file_name));