Display Magento categories in the Left side of the Homepage..

Magento has its top menu reserved for category navigation. It’s pretty solid for displaying categories, even when there is a large number of them.

In most of the cases clients want is a vertical == sidebar == category menu. so they can also put sub-categories in it like menu navigation. We can always expand on this, but in most of the cases 3 levels are more than enough for stores.

layout

app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/page.xml or your theme’s equivalent.

    getStoreCategories();
        Mage::registry('current_category') ? $currentCategoryId = Mage::registry('current_category')->getId() : $currentCategoryId='';
        foreach ($storeCategories as $_category):
    ?>
            

                getName(); ?>
                getChildren(); ?>
                count()) : ?>
                    

 
                        
                            load($_categoryChild->getId());?>
                            getChildren(); ?>
                            

                                getId() ? $bold="style=\"font-weight:bold\"" : $bold='';
                                    echo ' ' . '' .  $_categoryChild->getName() . '(' . $_categoryChildModel->getProductCollection()->count() . ')';
                                ?>
                            
                            count()) : ?>
                                
                                    load($_categoryGrandchild->getId());?>
                                    

                                        getId() ? $bold="style=\"font-weight:bold\"" : $bold='';
                                            echo '  ' . '' .  $_categoryGrandchild->getName() . '(' . $_categoryGrandchildModel->getProductCount() . ')';
                                        ?>
                                    
                                
                            
                        
                    
                
            
        

This will tell Magento to load our template on each page that sports a layout with a right column.

template file

Create app/design/frontend/base/default/template/page/custom.phtml with the following content:

See the below image as result:

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