Shop - Browse Category

On the left side of the shop pages we show the category list. When the customer clicks on a category on the left side she can see all products in that category. The shop main page include this navigation from include/leftNav.php and as mentioned before, the one responsible to get the list of categories for this navigation is the formatCategories() function in library/category-functions.php

In summary here is what formatCategories() do :

Get all the children categories
Get the parent category and other categories on the same level as the parent
Keep looping to get the parent's parent until we reach the top level category

This function is actually a bit too complex for handling two level deep categories. However in the future i want this shop to handle categories more than two level deep so i made this function so it can cope with that.

Okay, let's not talk about this function too much and move on with the code for leftNav.php

Source code : include/leftNav.php

<?php
if (!defined('WEB_ROOT')) {
exit;
}

// get all categories
$categories = fetchCategories();

// format the categories for display
$categories = formatCategories($categories, $catId);
?>
<ul>
<li><a href="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>">All Category</a></li>
<?php
foreach ($categories as $category) {
extract($category);
// now we have $cat_id, $cat_parent_id, $cat_name

$level = ($cat_parent_id == 0) ? 1 : 2;
$url = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] . "?c=$cat_id";

// for second level categories we print extra spaces to give
// indentation look
if ($level == 2) {
$cat_name = '    » ' . $cat_name;
}

// assign id="current" for the currently selected category
// this will highlight the category name
$listId = '';
if ($cat_id == $catId) {
$listId = ' id="current"';
}
?>
<li<?php echo $listId; ?>><a href="<?php echo $url; ?>"><?php echo $cat_name; ?></a></li>
<?php
}
?>
</ul>

The categories are printed as unordered lis ( <ul> ). I guess you already know that unordered list usually shows up like this :

list one
list two
- child 1
- child 2

But thanks to CSS ( Cascading Style Sheet ) we can alter how the browser display the list and give them than boxy look. I must admit that i'm a beginner to css and i learn this from projectseven.com, so if you want to know how the css works you can visit the site later.

Next up is the product browsing.

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Online Shop - Main Page

PHP MySQL Shopping Cart Tutorial : Online Shop - Browse Category

Online Shop - View Product List

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