1.9 RWD Theme - Layered Navigation

Question

I'm trying to move the top navigation to the left column of the page. Unfortunately I don't really know how I can manage this.

Since I have a lot of categories, I can't really use the Horizontal Navigation.

I have already tried changing the catalog.xml file, but it didn't seem to work. Cache is disabled, and its a clean install.

Thanks in advance!

I changed this:

<reference name="left_first">
    <block type="catalog/layer_view" name="catalog.leftnav" after="currency" template="catalog/layer/view.phtml">
        <block type="core/text_list" name="catalog.leftnav.state.renderers" as="state_renderers" />
    </block>
</reference>

to this

<reference name="left">
    <block type="catalog/layer_view" name="catalog.leftnav" after="currency" template="catalog/layer/view.phtml">
        <block type="core/text_list" name="catalog.leftnav.state.renderers" as="state_renderers" />
    </block>
</reference>

Unfortunately nothing changed. The path is: /magento/app/design/frontend/rwd/default/layout

Answer 1

So firstly I am making a few assumptions.

1. That you want to remove the normal navigation from the top and move it completely to the left hand-side,
2. That you are going to style it yourself :)

Firstly want you want to do is create a local.xml in your theme so you can change the xml of pages easily.

Then you want to unset the current main navigation.

<reference name="top.menu">
    <action method="unsetChild">
        <name>catalog.topnav</name>
    </action>
</reference>

Now what you want to do is move this into the left column.

<reference name="left">
    <action method="insert">
        <block>catalog.topnav</block>
    </action>
</reference>

Now in the end your complete local.xml file will look as follows.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<layout version="0.1.0">
    <default>
        <reference name="top.menu">
            <action method="unsetChild">
                <name>catalog.topnav</name>
            </action>
        </reference>
        <reference name="left">
            <action method="insert">
                <block>catalog.topnav</block>
            </action>
        </reference>
    </default>
</layout>

Now one very important thing to think about here is that not all pages have a left column. For instance in a default set-up the homepage and other cms pages do not have this as well as all product pages.

Answer 2

catalog/layer_view block is used to display the layered navigation filters (filter by attributes, price, or even category). What I understand you want to achieve is, display the full category structure inside the left column. In order to do it, you need to add a new block to the left column. A quick way would be to use the same block and template as in the header navigation.

Try this layout in catalog.xml:

<reference name="left">
    <block type="page/html_topmenu_renderer" name="left.catalog.nav.renderer" template="page/html/topmenu/renderer.phtml"/>
</reference>

*(haven't tested this yet)