Building a “You May Also Like” Block for Category Pages

A common SEO request is a small internal-linking block such as “You may also like” or “You might be interested in”. In category-driven sites, that block usually needs predictable logic rather than random links.

The requirement from the original case

• show three suggestions
• link neighboring subcategories within the same section
• for the current category, show one previous item and two following items

Why a raw &where attempt often fails

The original experiment tried to hard-code id-1, id+1, and id+2 inside a menu query. That rarely works reliably because document IDs are not sequence-safe navigation keys. Content can be deleted, moved, or created out of order.

A better approach

Build the list from actual sibling resources under the same parent and use menuindex or an explicit ordering field. Then calculate the previous and next items in PHP or in a helper snippet.

<?php
$siblings = $modx->getCollection('site_content', [
    'parent' => $parentId,
    'published' => 1,
    'deleted' => 0,
]);
// sort siblings by menuindex, find current item, then select
// one previous and two next items with wrap-around if needed.
?>

Why this is safer

• it survives content reordering
• it matches real section structure
• it gives you deterministic internal linking

For simple menus you can still render the final output through a chunk or DocLister-style template. The important part is not to treat database IDs as if they were editorial sequence numbers.