Shouldn't this Navigation capability be added?
I would like to suggest extra functionality, IMPORTANT functionality to
cp_pagination
To fix this all too common situation:
Let's say you are running a website with Classipress for, say, Cars and Trucks.
If you have a Tab or a Category link to, for example, Mustangs as a generic or parent category. It lines up a bunch of ads and you have specified that you will allow ten Ad summaries to show up before the Page 2, Page 3...etc. links are made.
Right now you click on one Ad summary out of a vertical list to go see the individual ad. Good. Read it. Done. You know you saw 15 ads in this category.
What do you do now? You want to browse through the whole category of 15.
1. Hit the BROWSER GO BACK to return to the category list to select one more ad to look at. OR--
2. You click the handy link provided that takes you back to another arrangement of those ads and you click the next one.
ON and ON you go through this process of going BACKWARDS to go FORWARDS.
4 years ago I was using a popular php real estate program. If a user discovered 67 houses that were listed in a certain neighborhood or in a certain price category they had to go through a two or three step process just to move from one ad to the next. I thought that was inconvenient and kept pressuring the developers of this program to add a Previous/Next paging function to the full Single Ad display page. It took months but they finally agreed to assign someone, after first declaring it impossible. I worked with the coder and put successively new modifications into my own code and tested them in different browsers as we improved on the process over the months.
When it looked ready for primetime that feature was then added to the program that they distribute today and it is an integral part of the browsing process for this real estate software. In the Admin panel you can choose whether you want to use this feature. It was also refined so that it still worked and gave the correct links even when the user specified they wanted to use
SEO friendly links.
This <<< PREVIOUS NEXT >>> feature should be in Classipress. The present method of moving from ad to ad is behind-the-times and and not "slick" at all. PHP and javascript can do more.
I have looked at various examples of Classipress websites that are listed in the Showoff forum and I don't find anybody doing more than the usual when it comes to browsing through ads.
What we should have working is THIS:
I want to look at all the Mustangs. All 27 ads...or as many as I can stand before I go look at all the Porsche ads.
- So, I am already in that category or sub-category.
- When I look at the Single default--just one Ad's details I would see at the top and the bottom of the ad arrows or word links just the same as I saw on the front page of Ad summaries.
- Having looked at this Ad I see a NEXT AD button, I click, and another Mustang ad loads in the page....on and on....
- And now that I am looking at the 2nd ad in this category I see a PREVIOUS AD button has appeared as well as the NEXT AD.
I can stay right here, looking at full ads about Mustangs with just a NEXT button. Simple, clean, convenient.
Since cp_pagination already assembled a string anyway for the Front page of a category or for the return list of ads produced in a Search, why not pass along this string to the next level-- into the actual Single Ad display page, too?
And, if I launch a search which pulls together a conglomerate of ads fitting my search parameters, the same function would work.
I am no longer in a Category: I am in my own particular search string and every time I click the NEXT button I see the next Ad produced by my search parameter.
And besides the Breadcrumb links I have a new Header that clearly identifies that every page I am presently looking at belongs to my particular Search.
The Classipress cp_pagination function will not work this way if it is embedded into the single-default.php file.
But since this function already "knows" the link to every Ad in a particular category why can't this be expanded so that this string is passed along to the SINGLE AD DISPLAY page, too? And this separately written function, say, cp_single_pagination, takes the same string information, filters it, re-writes it, and we stay in the single ad display mode everytime we use another Previous or Next link?
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