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Magento Columnised Navigation v1.1.1

Magento Columnised Navigation v1.1.1

As a follow-up to our Magento column navigation extension post from last week, we’ve just pushed the latest version to GitHub.

Featured Children Column

The major news is that the extension now allows you to specify a featured children column through the Magento backend (Catalog > Manage Categories).

The featured children list sits as the first column in the set (where applicable) and contributes to the maxCols setting (therefore doesn’t appear if maxCols is set to 1). Specifying a title will output a <h3> tag before the <ul>.

Setting Show in Featured Children to Yes will include this category in its parent featured column if it exists. Categories can be shown in the featured categories even if Include in Navigation Menu is set to No, allowing you to remove a category from the main navigation while retaining it as featured.

Magento 1.6 Support

The other major news is that the extension has now been tested in Magento 1.6 (v1.1.0′s attribute names were invalid for 1.6).

Download The Extension

Magento Columnnised Navigation package archives

Tested In

Magento 1.5, Magento 1.6

Your Comments

  1. Hi and thank you again for sharing this great extension. I’ve uninstalled the previous version by deleting the files and the 3 added fields in eav_attribute. But now when i install the v1.1.1 and empty cache, the new fields are not created. Maybe i forgot something while uninstalling the previous version ? Thank you for your help.

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    • Hi,

      Apologies for the delayed response. This will be due to the installer script not having run the second time after your initial installation; the MySQL installation script should really have been an upgrade script, which is an oversight on my part and will be rectified in the next release.
      In the meantime, if you are still interested in a resolution, you should be able to force the installation script to run by deleting the columnisednavigation_setup entry from your core_resource table (effectively making Magento forget it has installed this extension).

      Apologies again, and hopefully this helps?
      Dajve

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  2. Note that if you have Magento Developer mode on you get the following error:
    Notice: Undefined variable: level in …\app\code\community\TheDistance\ColumnisedNavigation\Block\Navigation.php on line 298

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    • Hi Mike,

      Thanks for the spot on that, I’ll have that resolved in the next release.

      Thanks again,
      Dajve

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  3. Hi there i commented on the other post about this and was wondering if this was the right one to download for 1.6.1 as i tried the other one and it broke my theme’s css :(

    cheers Dajve

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    • Hi Gloopy,

      Thanks again for the interest.

      The latest release of the extension can always be found in the GitHub repo here.

      Unfortunately, it is likely to break your site layout out-of-the-box, as there is no styling included (ie skin and template files), so is only suitable as a base upon which to apply your own CSS. The HTML the new Navigation block produces wraps lists of subcategories in a div, which need to be styled to float next to each other; no classes are removed from the elements previously produced however.

      There are plans in the future to add styling to make it more compatible with the base Magento skin, however I can’t guarantee when that will be (client work always increases at this time of the year!). The code was initially put out quickly and simply as we have come across the need for splitting navigation into columns on a number of sites and, as we develop our Magento themes from scratch for clients, we simply style the entire menu after installing the extension.

      Hope this helps?

      Cheers,
      Dajve

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