"Add a listing" link, displayed for each category

[Greg H]

I am trying to make an easy way for users to place a listing into the correct cat/sub cat.

I have a total of almost 400 categories and sub categories.

The way I plan on doing it is, by placing some code into the category.tpl.php which will display a link when viewing a category, that says "Click Here to place an Ad in this Category"

I am not sure of the code I need to use to pull the correct category ID.

Also remembering that some categories cannot have ads placed in them, their are sub-cats for that.

Thanks

[Maffo]

You need to send the user to step2 of user checkout with the defined section in the url

example only

PHP Code:

<a href="usercheckout.php?step=2§ion=what-ever-your-section-number-is">Place Ad in this Category</a>


Just as an observation, do you not feel that four hundred categories is a little much. From experience I have seen sites like this with lots and lots of empty pages. This harms you on search engines and also is a pain for customers browsing your site going through hundreds of categories.

My personal advice is to give the top categories permission to place ads and actually hide the sub cats. Once you have sufficient ads with in the top category you can open the subcats and relocate the ads to their specific section.

Maff

[civ]

Keep in mind that this will only work if they are already logged in (unless you plan to do some $_Session work as well).

[Greg H]

I absolutely agree that 400 categories is far too many.

My client however, does not. After I initially added over 350 and was close to launch, he decided to review them ALL. Fun.

Regarding your suggestion Maffo, I figured their would be a way to dynamically get the "section=what-ever-your-section-number-is". Seeing as the user is at that page. Is their not a way to use that information in your code?

Also, because I have made modifications, my link would need to go direct to step3.

eg:
"/usercheckout.php?step=3§ion=345&productid=9">Place an Ad in this Category

I was hoping for something to replace §ion=345&productid=9 with some code that would dynamically get that info, depending on what page the user is on.

[Lhotch]

Cant you just use the server global request variable to get the "sec" from the URI?

[Greg H]

Yes, this is what I will need to do.

Unfortunately I do not know how to do it.

I understand that I do ask a lot of you guys and I don't want you to hand it to me a on a platter but any clues would be much appreciated.

I'm going to owe you big time by the time I finish this project Larry.

Thanks

[Lhotch]

Originally Posted by Greg H

Yes, this is what I will need to do.

Unfortunately I do not know how to do it.

I understand that I do ask a lot of you guys and I don't want you to hand it to me a on a platter but any clues would be much appreciated.

I'm going to owe you big time by the time I finish this project Larry.

Thanks

Its not about not wanting too, but you mention your "client" which I guess leads me to believe you have someone paying you to do this which in turn leads me to believe you have some PHP knowledge(or at least I would expect you to if your charging someone to do this work for them). So with that in mind the recommendations I make should be enough to help you accomplish your goals.

Additionally, I dont spell everything out because I dont always have access to the scripts to be more specific and even when I do, I dont always have the time to actually do the mods myself to test them and then outline everything that needs to be done to perform the task.

For creating a link to a category, Looking at category.php you can see that the "sec" is already gathered from the URI in the following line...

$sec = (int)trim(@$_GET['sec']);

I think what I would do is simply pass it to the template by adding the following down at the bottom of the script with the rest of the assign statements...

$class_tpl->assign('section',$sec);

once you add that line to category.php any template based off it will be able to access the section via $section.

[Greg H]

Originally Posted by Lhotch

Its not about not wanting too, but you mention your "client" which I guess leads me to believe you have someone paying you to do this which in turn leads me to believe you have some PHP knowledge(or at least I would expect you to if your charging someone to do this work for them). So with that in mind the recommendations I make should be enough to help you accomplish your goals.

Larry, my php skills are very limited. I have done a number of sites using Joomla CMS, and I,m pretty good at manipulating it, thats about it. I massively underquoted it and my client is constantly throwing things at me, constant changes and modifications.

I have "hacked" my way through it and I am 90% done and have managed to get this far only with help from you and others on the forum and from Eric and Blair.

This site is the first of 5 that will be "almost" identical. The next one will be in German, then 3 or more in english but based in different countries.

With around 400 cats/subcats, there are people lined up ready to go by adding 1000's of products, which will be done using a bulk upload sytem being developed right now (quite a challenge)

Once done, this site WILL have many thousands of listings in a short amount of time.

Like I said , it has turned into a monster and administrating all these sites has the potential to become a full time job for me. I underquoted massively on the development of this but thats my problem and I have to look towards the future for any real financial benefit, for now I'm stuck here and just have to keep plugging away.

Sorry about giving my life story, I tend to that in real life within 5 mins of meeting people!

Thanks again for your help.