Aspdotnet custom sidebars, has something to do with mapping?

hi, i’m looking to take over a website where the previous person left off. i have no experience with aspdotnet shopping cart software (http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com) so bear with me if my questions seem amateurish.

we are currently running version 8.0 but plan to upgrade to the latest version, 9.3.1.

our site sells menswear. our objective is to create custom sidebars that are only relevant to whatever product category the website visitor is on. for instance, when a visitor is on a shoe product page or shoe category page, we want a list in the sidebar of all the shoe subcategories. and when someone is on a tie product page or tie category page, we want a sidebar list of all tie subcategories to appear. is that possible? if so, how easy/difficult is that to setup? i think i has something to do with “mapping” though I’m not entirely sure what mapping is just yet.

please advise. thanks in advance!

IIRC, there is a pre-built template already there which does that, and it may already be in the category and/or product templates. Look in those templates for the word related - it might require a AppConfig change to activate it. If there isn’t one, you could use another template as a basis (the tableorderform.xml.config file comes to mind) to work from.