Lesson 19. Products — Categories. Part 1

A big number of products in the store poses a problem of organizing it into a sensible structure, and that’s where categories come in handy. The system of categories allows an owner of the php ecommerce application to build the catalog in the way of a tree with multiple branches, making the navigation structured, intuitive, and clear. The branches of this so called tree are root categories and their sub-categories. By the way each sub-category can have its own sub-categories. The number of root categories and subcategories is unlimited.

After explaining the structure of categories let’s take a closer look at the interface of this section of the ecommerce program. In the Position column values regulate the order of displaying categories on a storefront. The Name column helps you to find the desired category. Products — the number of products in the category. Usually products are assigned to subcategories so that it would be easier to find them in the future. They are displayed in the root category anyway. Use the last column to activate and deactivate categories.

On the right side of the page there is a Total panel that gathers information about categories. Here’s the description of actions that can be performed on categories. The Plus button is used to add a new category. The gear button—to manage several categories at once, add categories, edit selected ones, and delete them.

When doing bulk category addition an administrator of the shopping cart creator software specifies only the basic information to identify this category later. You can also clone the information to speed up the process.

Editing in a bulk mode looks this way. You select desired categories. Choose properties that require editing. And then edit them on one page.

Be careful when deleting a category of the small business ecommerce software! Child categories and the products under this category will be deleted automatically.

Use the category gear button to deal with a separate category. You can add products straight to it, edit the category, and delete it.

That was a brief explanation of how categories work in CS-Cart open source web store software.