Thread: A few (hopefully easy) questions

A few (hopefully easy) questions

Hi,

Very close to purchasing but my client has some specific needs and I cant find the answer.

The documentation says the map appears on the category listings pages. But on the demo it only appears at the top level (ie. it shows for "american" but not on "burgers" - even though this is also a category listing page and seems to use the same template). I would need the map to appear on every cat and subcat page. Or preferably it only appear on the final subcat page as if it appears further up the hierarchy it would be overcrowded with unhelpful results. Is that actually doable?

on the demo when you click on "categories" it gives you a formatted list of all the categories and their subcategories which is logical. But when you click on something like "american" it then lists every entry as opposed to a list of subcategories which you would then click through. This is important because we could have three levels of categories and there could be hundreds of subcategories - so click on "american" and getting a thousand results back makes no sense and is of no help. So can subcategories show as a list as you click through them until you get to the final level and only at that point get the business listings?


When you do a search the righthand sidebar gives you the option to refine results by checking boxes. And yet it seems to list every single category in the site including all the ones that arent relevant to the search you have done. (eg if i have searched for chinese food in new york why would i then want to refine the search by having an option like mexican?). Can we control exactly what checkboxes are shown and can these vary from section to section?

Recent reviews and recent listings just seem to be the latest ones from the entire site. Can this be restricted according to what category you are currently in?

Sadly advertising is way too simplistic and we wouldn't be able to sell space properly with the current tools. We are considering OIO Publisher. Are you aware of any compatibility issues? (I imagine lots of people ask about this)

And my final questions is how much control is there over home page layout? We wouldn't want to show latest listings and don't want a map at that point as we would rather have something like category info to help people filter down to what they need?

many thanks (I know its a lot of questions!)

James

That's correct, "American" is the category, but "Burgers" is a subcategory, so the map does not appear on that view by default. Technically yes you could make this change through modification of the theme, but it is not a setting within the Vantage admin dashboard.

Regarding how the categories are displayed, in the Vantage admin you can control whether or not to display the subcategories below the categories in the menu itself, however clicking the category will still display the results rather than show a list as you describe. Again, this could be changed through customization of the default theme, but is not an option.

At this time there are no additional controls for the advanced search functionality. Eventually we plan to allow more options like with our ClassiPress theme, where you can determine which custom fields are searchable.

By default, the only controls for that particular widget at this time is related to how many recent listings are shown and which sidebar to place the widget in.

Although I have seen mention of OIO Publisher in the forums, there is no confirmation from any members of the community who specifically state this as been tested and definitely works. AppThemes does not officially support third party plugins so we cannot guaranatee that all plugins will be compatible.

The theme is not encrypted, so you are free to customize the layout as you wish. We recommend the use of a child theme if you are looking to modify the default theme, as this will prevent you losing all of your changes in the process of an update. You may also like to check out the AppThemes customer showcase to see the kinds of modifications other customers have made to the theme. Thanks.

thank you

Thanks for that. Sadly not the answers I was hoping for but as its an off-the-shelf theme I can't expect too much flexibility. Maybe that will come with future versions.

One thing I don't get though is why the forums are limited to people who have already purchased.

Googling reveals you have forum threads on a few of my questions so people are discussing these issues and may have found workarounds. If I could see there were solutions it would show the theme was extendable and would ease my decision as whether I should buy (because sadly if I cant find workarounds I cant use it and have wasted my budget).

Thank you for your help

No problem, glad we were able to help clarify these things prior to purchase :)

Our themes include an annual subscription fee in order to maintain theme updates and support, so restricting the forums is only fair to those who are paying for this access. It's unfortunate we also have to deal with individuals who have obtained nulled versions of our themes, so it's a way they don't get to gain access to support their not entitled to either. Thanks.

Forum access

Couldn't you just restrict who can post in the forums so that guests and unregistered users can still read them? It would be very insightful and helpful for those of us considering the theme to be able to read what people are having success and struggle with, also to gauge support levels.

We appreciate your feedback, however this ultimately still leaves the forums open to those who have less genuine intentions. If there are pre-sales questions or concerns a person has, then we're more than happy to answer them here. Thanks.