Left Column Category Display

[bplex]

Yea, the HTML may have been a bit off when you were looking at it because I was just working on it. I added a couple of links for "featured videos".

Ah. That would explain why it looked a bit off. I just checked it and it does appear to be correct now.

You say that a category linking system is extremely simple, I would like to see what you have in mind, because the way I did this, takes some work.

What I did was:
I have two sites - a (Miva Merchant shopping cart hosted with Hostasaurus.com) and a (vshare video site hosted with HostOnNet.com).

The main site is my Miva Shopping Cart and I am using an iframe to pull the vShare Video content into the site.
In order to make this work I create a new iframe page with-in my shopping cart to display the desired link page.
And yes, they are all hardcoded.

All you need to do is make changes to your templates to include the links that you want to have. It's basic template/HTML design. The way you have done it, you could have easily built a table that ran along the left side of your page that contained the links. One thing to understand is that the templates are just guidelines. You can pretty much put whatever code that you want into your templates.

As for your iframe idea, if I were doing it, I wouldn't use the iframe approach. This can create security problems as you can run into cross site scripting issues. A better approach would be to wrap vShare around whatever you wanted at the vShare site versus using your shopping cart.

You say that PHP coded links can slow the system down - I don't know php very well; I am an HTML, Flash, and Miva user, so I am not really sure of all the details behind this. What I do know is that YouTube has a linking system and they are a very popular site, how do this without suffer performance degradation?

This is like comparing Apples to Oranges. Technically, anyone can use PHP coded links. However, you need both optimized and scaled software as well as optimized and scaled hardware. YouTube is not a site consisting of a server. Rather, YouTube is a site consisting of a server farm. They have separate servers that deal with each aspect of their site (page rendering, databases, file conversion, storage, processing, etc). For them, they have so much power behind running their site that things that would typically be server intensive do not matter. For the small guy running vShare, you have to consider that, by the design of vShare, all processing is handled by a single server. Because of this, you have to be very considerate of what processes you want to take on and what processes you can live without.