Question

I would like to add sibling categories to layered navigation (whenever a customer is is
already one layer in).

In other words: lets say I have a category called ‘Animals’ and sub categories named ‘Cats’ ‘Dogs’ and ‘Lions’ respectively, if a customer clicks on ‘Lions’ I want them to see in “Shop by category” Cats and Dogs.

Does anyone have any idea on how to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This shouldn’t be too difficult. The code below is untested, but it should work wherever you put it in the front end. What it will do is give you access to the collection of sibiling categories, but you will need to figure out where in the templates you put it.

$parentId = Mage::registry('current_category')->getParentCategory()->getId();
$cats = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($parentId)->getChildrenCategories();
foreach ($cats as $cat) {
  // first, skip current category.
  if ($cat->getId() == Mage::registry('current_category')->getId()) continue;
  // then do something with $cat
  echo $cat->getName().", ";
}