Categories and Subcategories?

[sdweim85]

Is there anyway to have subcategories after you choose a category?

Meaning they search "John" in category "January"

Then once the search hits there are other categories such as years like "1961" "1962"

[Ray]

We would advise using the Custom Meta Fields feature to achieve this:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support...ta_fields.html

Not strictly subcategory (e.g. your choice of subcategories do not change depending on the parent category), but each meta field is an AND selection, so all selected criteria must apply.

[sdweim85]

That isn't exactly what we need, or probably wouldn't work. I do appreciate the answer though.

I'll be more descriptive. We looked deeper into this idea of sub-categories, but really they are just categories that are 1-2 directories deeper into the file structure when searching. Since if you searched for Harry potter in the category book, then searched again in a category Harry potter chapter 1. If the file structure you are searching through is just /Book/Harry Potter/Chapter 1, the results would end up being the same anyways.

So the Categories would just be added with the "sub" categories in the Categories section like normal.

Categories
Academic publications /academic publications
commencements /academic publications/commencements
announcements /academic publications/announcements
Time clock /Timeclock
clockedin /Timeclock/clockedin
clockedout /timeclock/clockedout


The tricky part that we are having a hard time figuring out is then you have to format the page in a way so that it is obvious which are categories and sub-categories to the user running the search.

Normally this would show up like


Academic publications
commencements
announcements
Time clock
clockedin
clockedout


But if it was formatted like this

Academic publications Time clock
(Drop down list) (Drop down list)
commencements Clockedin
announcements Clockedout

It would be obvious that commencements and announcements were sub-categories of Academic Publications.

So basically is there a way to edit the way the Categories are listed, but still deliver the same effect when clicking them.

[Ray]

Not sure if I understand that last formatting completely. I think you mean there's two dropdown lists, one titled "Academic Publications" with two possible values ("commencements" and "announcements") and one titled "Time clock" (with "clockedin" and "clockedout"). But would you still be able to do a search for ALL academic publications only ("/academic publications") or ALL Time clock ("/timeclock"), as you would in the example earlier in the post? Is this required or not?

If you want two dropdown lists, Custom Meta Fields would still achieve this best. You didn't say why this didn't achieve what you want. I will presume you can't add custom meta fields to your pages easily? e.g. if you have dynamically generated pages, this should be easy to add.

You can actually re-create the search form in HTML in whatever way you desire, you simply need to reproduce the values and parameter names to match. If you take a look at this FAQ:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support...tml#searchform

You will see the HTML source code for a typical search page, as well as the categories section. A better way to do this is to go to your own search page and right click and "View Source".

Then you can take those values and use any HTML form element to represent those values. For example, you could even change them to checkboxes. But two dropdown lists, I'm not sure. I don't think you can have two dropdown lists with the same parameter name (of "zoom_cat").

Finally, have you considered even simply just naming your sub-categories with "|____" prefacing so it looks like this:

Academic publications
|____ commencements
|____ announcements