Make a List of your Product Categories
Each item inside the keep must become allocated up to a category. If you only own some goods then chances are you can easily simply list them all below that the single category however if you have got dozens, hundreds and/or huge number of products then you're likely to wish some categories to about reach this possible for the your customers to fast come across the product they like to purchase.
So prior to installing the items, its best to setup the groups.
How to choose categories? Eventually this choice is actually around you and yet as being a basic rule I such as to imagine that if your certain function of a system is needed by that the client for consumers to purczase the product and then that component describes a category. So if you offer things such as underwear, footwear, or even golf groups, I can believe of two groups you might immediately have – Mens as well as Womens – because your consumer will definately need their item in order to both stay concerning guys or concerning ladies.
Login to your OpenCart Admin
Open your browser and type in your OpenCart admin address. This will be something like ‘http://www.yourdomain.com/admin‘. Of course, replace yourdomain.com with your registered domain name.
The exact address will have been generated when you installed OpenCart onto your web server so if you are unsure of it, check your notes from the install.
Access your Categories Menu
Once logged in, your admin dashboard appears and along the top of the screen is a menu bar. Hover over ‘Catalog’ and from the drop down menu click on ‘Categories’.
If you’ve performed a standard installation of OpenCart, your store is filled with sample data and in this Categories section you will see quite a number of sample categories. It’s well worth having a good look through the sample data to learn about all the different settings. You will eventually want to delete them before going live with your store and you could start on that deletion now but be advised that you won’t be able to delete any sample categories if they have sample products within them – you’ll have to delete the products first.
Anyway, for much of these tutorials I’m leaving the sample data in place and will delete it later on.
So, after clicking on ‘Categories’ a list of the sample categories appears with two options at the top right of the screen: ‘Insert’ and ‘Delete’.
If you want to delete a category, you simply check the box next to the name of the category you want to delete and then click ‘Delete’. I’m not going to delete any of the sample data now, rather I’m going to create a new category…
Create a New Category
To create a new category, click ‘Insert’.
The three tabs at the top of the page (General, Data, Design) each contain various fields or selections for you to complete or make to create the new category.
General Tab
Category Name: Enter your chosen name of the category. This should be something descriptive as it will appear on any menus in the store. For that reason it should be brief as well.
Meta Tag Description: This description is used by search engines to describe this category in search results.
Meta Tag Keywords: Keywords are a list of terms, separated by commas that highlight important information on your page. Search engines used to place great importance on the meta tag keywords when ranking websites but that focus has reduced significantly in recent times. Don’t abuse this feature. Listing popular words that have no relationship to the content of your category (let alone your website) in the hope that it will generate higher search rankings will not work. Limit your keywords to appropriate words or phrases that accurately describe or relate to the information on your page.
Description: This description will appear when this category’s page is displayed on your store front. You can include HTML, flash, and images.
Parent Category: OpenCart categories can be structured in a hierarchy. Here you can choose to make the category you are currently adding a subcategory of another category. The parent category must already have been created in order to appear in the drop down list.
Stores: OpenCart supports the administration of multiple stores from the one admin panel. If you have multiple stores setup then here you select which store(s) you would like this category to appear in.
SEO Keyword: By default, OpenCart categories have a URL along the lines of: ‘http://www.opencarttutorial.com/store/index.php?route=product/category&path=20′ which is not very SEO friendly. If you enable SEO URLs in the system setup (covered in …) and here you entered, say, ‘desktops’ then the above example would become ‘http://www.opencarttutorial.com/store/desktops’. Much better, dont’ you think. It is important that whatever keyword (or phrase with each word separated by a hyphen) that you use is not used as the SEO Keyword for any other category or product on your site!
Image: Click the ‘Browse Files’ link to open up the OpenCart Image Manager and select the image you want to appear on this category’s page. (The Image Manager is pretty much self explanatory but I will publish a brief tutorial on its use in a separate post because it is used in many sections of the OpenCart admin, not just the categories section).
Top: If you would like this category to appear in the top menu bar then check this box. Note that there is finite space on the top menu bar so depending on the length of the titles you give you categories only so many can fit on the bar without breaking the design. Best thing to do is to play around with it until you find a satisfatory result from both design and usability perspectives.
Columns: If this category has (or is going to have) subcategories, and if you will position this category in the top menu bar such that it occupies any of the three most right-hand-side positions, then the number you enter here will determine how many columns are used to display the subcategories in the auto drop down box.
This can be a difficult feature to explain and I’m not sure if I’ve done an adequate job. Perhaps the best way to learn about it is to open up the front end of your newly installed store with all the sample data still intact (another good reason to leave the sample data untouched) and hover your mouse over the right most category in the top menu bar … ‘MP3 Players’. You should notice that its subcategories appear in a drop down box containing four columns. If you then take a look at the settings for the category ‘MP3 Players’ in your admin section you will see that the columns field has been filled with the number 4.
Sort Order: The sort order determines what order your categories appear in your menu(s) with the lowest number appearing first. So the category with a sort order of 2 will appear above or to the left of a category with a sort order of 6 depending on whether it is appearing in a vertical or horizontal menu.
It is tempting to simply number your categories 1, 2, 3 … and so on but I would recommend that you number them at least 5 numbers apart. ie. 5, 10, 15 … etc. Reason is, if you number them with consecutive numbers and later on realise you want to add a category into the middle of the list, you have to re-number most of your categories to accomodate the insertion of the new one. That could be a crazy amount of work that you could have avoided from the outset. So, your sequence doesn’t have to have a spacing of 5, it can be anything you want, but I really would urge to leave some space.
Status: Two options here, Enabled/Disabled. For this category to appear in your store front you need to select ‘Enabled’.
Why the disabled option you ask? It allows you to remove a category from your store and yet retain its settings in case you want to reintroduce it in the future. The alternative would be to delete the whole category and if you want to bring it back … you guessed it … you have to go through this whole setup process again.
Design Tab
Within this tab there is only the one option …
Layout Override: The layout options within OpenCart require a guide of their own so I won’t go into them here but if you are familiar with the use of them, and have setup different layouts, then use the drop down box here to choose the layout you want to apply to this particular category.
If you have not setup up different layouts, or are unsure of their use then leave the drop down box blank.
Only one step to go, and it’s pretty important … click the ‘Save’ button on the top right!
