You don’t get sub-collections out of the box, but you can work something out using tags.

(And don’t forget to use ‘product type’ to your advantage.)

I could create these pages manually as static “Pages” but would prefer to do it dynamically if possible.

Yes, that’s what I would do as well, use collection.liquid with a little added logic, and leave page.liquid alone.

Gator, this should get you thinking…

http://forums.shopify.com/categories/1/posts/13784#comment-13833

You can also use a combination of collections, linklists and product tags to achieve this as well. Here’s a working example…

<ul>
    {% for c in collections %}
    {% assign: collection_handle = c.handle %}
    <li><a href="{{ c.url }}">{{ c.title }}</a>
        {% if linklists.[collection_handle] %}
        <ul>
            {% for link in linklists.[collection_handle].links %}
            <li><a href="{{ link.url }}">{{ link.title }}</a></li>
            {% endfor %}
        </ul>
        {% endif %}
    </li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>

Simply create linklists with the same title (handle) as your collections. Any links within those linklists with be sub-categories of that collection. Each link should be of a collection with a specified tag.

Good luck!

Jared, Thanks for the helpful reply. Since sub-collections aren’t exactly built-in I thought I’d change my terminology and refer to 30 collections I want to organize into 6 groups.

If I understand your working example, it would output the following (with links):

<ul>
    <li>Group1
        <ul>
            <li>Collection1</li>
            <li>Collection2</li>
            <li>Collection3</li>
            <li>Collection4</li>
            <li>Collection5</li>
        </ul>
    </li>
    <li>Group2
        <ul>
            <li>Collection6</li>
            <li>Collection7</li>
            ... and so on        
</ul>

And if I added your code to theme.liquid I’d have a dynamic navigation menu on each page.

I think what I want to do is a little different and I’ve attached a diagram of my store.

There are 4 types of pages numbered in my diagram. #3 & 4 are currently working fine, but how can I create types 1 & 2? It seems that #2 would need a new liquid file like “groups.liquid” which I could create but is that possible or correct?

If this is really a complex programming problem then is it better to build-out the top 7 pages (types 1 & 2) manually as static pages? If it’s simple to do with linklists, tags, product-type, and collections then I’m all for it.

— Last edited 05:31PM, Jul 24, 2008

Hello.

I’m trying to do exactly what Gator described in the post above. (See screen shot).

I’ve tried using tags, and product types, and everything else I can think of. Nothing seems to work.

I read a few posts from Tobi that say things like this can be done with collections and tags, but is sure can’t figure out how. It’s a difficult system to get your head around – especially coming from other software that has sub-collections.

Any guidance on this would be much appreciated.

We just finalized a change to Shopify that allows tags to be of arbitrary characters.

One of the things that made tag based navigation so hard to create was that tags had to be lowercase and ascii character only. We removed this requirement now and the change should go out early next week.

(Clarification, you can now have tags “Like This” instead of only “likethis” )

— Last edited 09:40PM, Sep 21, 2008

Hey Tobi,

That’s a nice improvement. I could still use some guidance on creating a structure like the one in gator’s screen shot above. I’m not looking for someone to spoon-feed me the solution, but at this point I’m not even sure it’s possible.

If it is possible, what combination of collections/product types/tags should I be after?

—
Tom

Beautiful! God that was annoying. I think that is why I never ended up really using tags in the first place.

@tobi: WOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

that changes everything!!! Thank you!
(I might even have to come back…)

How will that work in URLs though? Will the tag be handleized for the URL..? (that would be fine).

— Last edited 07:00PM, Sep 22, 2008

^^^ BUMP

I have exactly the same question that RenoBird and Gator have in this thread.

Does anyone know whether the hierarchical system is possible?

I’m also a bit confused about the expanded character set feature for tags.

I mean, I understand that this is a great feature in and of itself, but how can this feature be used to implement the hierarchical categorized system?

If this is not possible, can someone please simply reply back and let us know?

Thanks!