One of the early developments in the Affiliate Developer Forum from webmasters using Amazon Store Manager script was the need of a menuing system that can be configured for other types of menu listing aside from what is available within the standard script definition.
This tutorial recaps one of the posts in the forum, which introduces the method of hard-coding menu items or additional URLs into the script itself.
Menu items in Amazon Store Manager is returned by the %%leftNav%% variable, coded into the script/templates/header/tpl file, from all enabled categories in the script/nodes/*_browse.inc file. This means that the menu listing can be 30 items long for a ASM2 scripted general shopping site or as short as a one item list if you are setting up a single product niche store.
As an example, click on the Books - Arts & Photography category of your site and observe that the location bar of your browser will be displaying the following URL:
http://www.yoursitename.tld/Books/browse-1.html
where,
Books is the Mode (SearchIndex),
browse is the call function, and
1 is the BrowseNode for Arts & Photography books.
Convert this URL link to a proper HREF tag which you will then add to the menu column of your page/script.
Use your favorite text editor to open up the Script/templates/header.tpl file, Look for the section indicated below :
and replace the '%%leftNav%%' item with the code you have created :
Built up the rest of your menu listing using the correct Mode and BrowseNodes, duplicate the menu item box if you want to display the categories separately.
The whole idea about customizing the menu column is not only to give you the ability to juggle the category mix of your site (aside from configuring the script/nodes/*_browse.inc file, mix and match product items from different sections of Amazon but also to really customize your site to the lowest level of products sub-categories thats availiable for your selection.
Do your node harvesting from the pages of Amazon itself or, better still, use a browse node lookup service, such as BrowseNode.name.
