How to edit index_nested.tpl.php

[Phixon]

I believe this is the file i need to edit to make the sub categories page look more attractive.

(the second page E.G. Mens clothing > DIFFERENT TYPES OF CLOTHES > products

how do i go about making that page a bit neater than this

http://tinyurl.com/5lux79

login - admin
PW admin (lowercase)

ideally i want them to look attractive like osCommerce

I understand css, but dont know how to apply to this php page

[JohnW]

I'll try and help you with your last 3 questions at once since they're all similar. First thing is you should go through the admin panel line by line because most of the adjustments you want are right there and you don't have to hack the files. If you get to know the admin panel really well you'll save a lot of headaches.

You can select your items to display 2 per row like in the OSC example but you're showing your site with sub categories and they don't have any subcategories so the set up is different. They just have categories with the products listed which is very neat but not always practical. I have categories with several subs and it works pretty well.

You might find it easiest to make all your thumbnail pics a uniform height and use the mo pics function for a larger pic that can be enlarged on the product info page.

Hope this helps.

[Phixon]

Well the person that will be using the site when finished will just dump them in, therefore they wont be uniform.

I want to try and contain each sub category but allow it some room to breath to allow various heights on the images.

In the meantime, i will do what you said and study each option in the admin area.

[JohnW]

Basically most of the control settings are in the admin/config section and admin/config/maximum values/categories to list per row is one of the settings. Under admin/images you can restrict the image dimensions.

[met00]

also, the standard listing is the "list" view. I have found that many prefer the table view (product_listing_col) and then you can play with how many cols and how many items per page (remember that the # of items per page should be divisible by the # of cols... so if you have 4 cols then you want to use 24 items per page and 5 cols you want to use 35 (so you get 7 rows).

[JohnW]

There really is a lot of flexibility and options built into Max2.0 that can be easily changed down the road if something doesn't work out, but sometimes simple is best. I actually like the list view because of the flow and I use long product names and it's real simple to scroll down. One thing I learned after starting my site in 2002 is that my clientele is not computer savy at all. I mention this because after looking at your site and the items you're selling I think the people that wil buy there are nature lovers that like things simple.

Food for thought.

[Phixon]

After playing around with admin, i had (what to me at the time seemed at the time) a brain wave.
I realized that I could set the subcategory image HEIGHT to 100 instead of width which eliminated the height problem completely

[JohnW]

That solves one problem but can create another because it distorts image aspect ratio and it doesn't compress the file size for faster loading. If you have a lot of pictures that vary you will see what I mean. Ultimately, it's worth taking the time to process the pics ahead of time.

[Phixon]

How will it distort the aspect, as there is no width restrictions?

This only applies to when the images are displayed in the sub category page, in the rest of the site, it is determined by height as normal.

I personally don't have a problem with processing the images, but I want to make it as easy i can for the person I am making it for.

[met00]

For ages I used to not care about how clean the images were for the sub-cats. But as more and more people have come on-line and the on-line world is getting more competitive how these images look does start to make a difference.

The end result was that I am slowly creating a standard look and feel. I created a simple template in a .psd file and then I place my "images" in the template which is fixed in height and width. Now all my sub-categories line up nice and neat. The site looks much more professional and I have actually gotten comments from customers on why some categories look less professional than others (I explain that we are doing a specific number of them every day and we will be done by August).