Using JReviews with unlimited levels of categories

From JReviews Documentation
Jump to: navigation, search

Starting with Joomla 2.5 you can have an infinite number of nested categories and you can use those categories with JReviews.

City Guide example

Here is an example of category structure for a "City Guide" type of site:

  • Hotels & Travel
    • Airports
    • Car Rental
    • Hostels
    • Hotels
    • Tours
  • Food & Drink
    • Restaurants
    • Coffee Shops
    • Nightclubs
    • Bars
  • Services
    • Automotive Services
      • Auto Repair
      • Car Dealers
      • Car Wash
    • Professional Services
      • Accounting
      • Advertising
      • Graphic Design
      • Marketing
    • Home Services
      • Contractors
      • Gardeners
      • Home Cleaning
      • Interior Design


The example shows only 3 levels, but you can add as many as you want.

If you are building this type of site for many countries and cities, you are probably thinking about adding countries as first level categories, cities as second level and business types as third level and below. Even though it is possible, we don't recommend that. Instead you should use custom fields for countries, states and cities. Otherwise, you would need to duplicate business categories for each city category (because one category can't have more than one parent category). With many cities and business types there would be a lot of category duplication.


Setting up nested categories in JReviews Categories Manager

Joomla 2.5 and above allow article submission to any category, but in most cases you will want your users to submit listings only into last level categories.

For example, it wouldn't make sense to allow listing submission into Services or Automotive Services categories, user should select the last level category before seeing the submit form.

Even though some of first and second level categories won't have listings, they still need to be setup in JReviews Categories Manager, but for those categories you will select This category will not have listings instead of a listing type. For other categories that will contain listings, select one of the listing types that you created.


CategoriesManagerJ16.png