[Mark Kawabe]

Greetings Steve,

First off, thanks for creating and maintaining such an awesome plugin! I use Connections on a couple of other sites and it’s been great.

I’m having some trouble setting up Connections in the way I’d hoped I could and am looking for your help.

The site is http://sworks.theniagaraguide.com. Still under development – I’m just working on the mechanics to see if I can get it to do what I want.

You can see at the top of the page, there’s a link to “Recreation”. Ideally this goes to a static page which displays companies that are “featured” in the Recreation category. Ideally, that page will also display all the Recreation sub-categories in a list below. I’m not sure how to accomplish that. I have the Extended Categories extension installed, but when I activate it, it puts the category list up on other pages where I don’t want it.

So, as an example, there’s a page for martial arts. http://sworks.theniagaraguide.com/niagara-martial-arts/ Because I’m intending to offer different levels of exposure in this directory, there are categories for “featured martial arts” and just “martial arts”. “Featured” listings go at the top of the topic pages. I’m doing individual pages partly for SEO purposes as well.

If I activate the extended categories extension, the full list of categories for the entire directory shows up before the featured listings on the martial arts page. Plus, I haven’t figured out how to show JUST the recreation categories on the recreation homepage.

I’m also planning to use your category redirect script to direct people to the static pages when they click on the category links.

I guess what I need to know is whether what I am trying to do is possible.

Visit static recreation homepage. See featured listings (in Gridder), see list of recreation categories below, then get to other recreation category static pages by clicking on recreation category links OR go to featured business profile pages.

I hope I’m clear :) Many thanks in advance for your feedback.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Mark Kawabe.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Mark

If I fully understand, I think you can do what you want. The first thing you need to do is turn off displaying the category list. This setting is found on the Connections : Settings admin page under the Display tab in the Categories section. The option name is named “Display” and it is a checkbox. Removing the check and saving the settings stops the display.

Now you can manually place the category list using the [connections_categories] shortcode. There are a few options which can be used to configure the list such as by category. Most of the other display options are still defined by the options on the Settings admin page.

Hope this helps, let me know.

[Mark Kawabe]

Success!!! Thank you!! :)

Okay – one other question – is there a way I can NOT display a category in that list?

To achieve the desired result, I had to create a “featured” category, such as “martial arts featured”, but there is still a generic “martial arts” category.

I tried using this code to NOT show the “martial arts featured” category:

[connections_categories child_of=386 exclude_category=615]

No luck there. Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Mark Kawabe]

I figured out how to hide that category via CSS, although I’d really like to know if the exclude_category function can work in this context as it’s so much easier to work with.

One more question…

I was planning to use the category redirect method as outlined in this page:

https://connections-pro.com/2015/10/01/redirect-on-category-select/

The martial-arts and martial-arts-featured categories were set to redirect to the martial arts page instead of their category pages. Proper category IDs and page IDs were verified.

I checked, and the snippet is activated. Unfortunately, it’s not working. I’m not sure if there’s a code issue, or, whether perhaps this function doesn’t work in this context.

Again, any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

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[Steven Zahm]

@ Mark

RE: Hide category

A possible solution is to create a “Featured” parent category with a child of “Martial Arts”.

You can display that category ID to show just your featured entries and for the regular entries you can display the category as you are now.

So, the difference is that you are moving the feature entries to the own parent child tree.

Hope this makes sense!

RE: category redirect

Correct, the code snippet does not work in this context. That is only for when filtering by category via the drop down filter available in the premium templates.

Here’s a free addon for Connections for advanced users which may do what you require:

https://github.com/Connections-Business-Directory/Category-Homepage

Hope that helps, let me know!

[Mark Kawabe]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for the information :)

The information on Github.com – how do I apply it? Sorry – I don’t have that much experience when it comes to adding additional files to WordPress…

Best Regards,
Mark

[Steven Zahm]

@ Mark

You would download the zip file by clicking the green download button and then install that zip you would any other WP plugin by click the Add New plugin link in the WP admin.

Hope that helps!

[Mark Kawabe]

Hi Steven,

Thanks! With your help, I figured it out.

Alas, it doesn’t seem to do what I need it to do.

I set the recreation category to use the recreation homepage as the default template. Then I added a section into the recreation homepage to show the list of child categories under recreation. So far, so good. Looks like this: http://sworks.theniagaraguide.com/niagara-recreation-homepage/

Where the challenge is for me is that the list of categories really does need to go to a specific page instead of one fully governed by Connections, just because I’m offering different levels of visibility for paid and free listings on directory pages.

Two examples:

Martial Arts: http://sworks.theniagaraguide.com/niagara-martial-arts/

All listings come from Connections, but top (paid) listings use Gridder, lower (free) listings use the Tile Plus template (at the moment). The free listings at the bottom are displayed on a page with a right column which will show ads. when you click on a link from the top featured businesses (paid) their listings are shown on a page with and ad-free full-width layout.

Trail riding: http://sworks.theniagaraguide.com/niagara-recreation-homepage/cat/recreation/trail-riding/

All listings are “equal”, with respect to size and placement, so that doesn’t work for my purposes.

Unfortunately, for me, this isn’t a solution that works. Or if it is, I haven’t figured it out.

For my application, the “ideal” solution would be to have that category redirect function work in this particular context so that every category could be set to point to a specific page on the site. A significant advantage of a page like the martial arts one is that I can add more content for SEO and other purposes.

I realize it’s probably a heap of work to make that category redirect function work the way I would like it to, but if it’s not, I’d really appreciate it if you could slide that into your undoubtedly busy schedule.

Otherwise, I guess I’ll forge ahead. Thank you so much for your assistance!

Best Regards,
Mark

[Steven Zahm]

@ Mark

RE: For my application, the “ideal” solution would be to have that category redirect function work in this particular context so that every category could be set to point to a specific page on the site.

This is exactly what can be done with Category Homepage addon. Have you installed it? Have you edited the categories and chose the page they should link to?

[Mark Kawabe]

Hmm. Getting closer, I think.

Categories – I created a parent category of “featured businesses”, then created “martial arts featured” as a child of it. Martial Arts Featured is category ID 615.

I set the homepage of “martial arts featured” to the Niagara Martial Arts page.

However, the featured martial arts listings don’t show up. Just the non-featured ones show up in the spots for the top and bottom listings.

Clicking on the link for “martial arts” takes me to http://sworks.theniagaraguide.com/niagara-martial-arts/cat/martial-arts/

It seems close, but I’m missing something. Any suggestions? Your help is much appreciated!

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