Magento is one of the most popular Open Source e-commerce software. It was initially released in March 31, 2008 by Varien Inc. It is a PHP based software, uses Zend Framework and the proprietary “Varien” libraray.
Magento is a free as well as a paid software – How? It depends upon which Magento verision you are using – Magento Community Edition (CE) or the Magento Enterprise Edition (EE). But now the question comes – Why will I pay if I can get it for free? The answer is “Great things come for a fee”. Actuallay Magneto CE is as good as Magento EE. It all depends on you needs, business size and how much are you ready to invest.
In one of my project we had a two level category hierarchy. Clicking on the top level category displayed a promotional banner and the sub-categories. The second level category page displayed the products. In this post we will discuss how we can display the subcategories on a category page. We are not going to create any new module.
STEP 1: Create a PHTML file
First we create a phtml file {{MAGENTO_ROOT}}\app\design\frontend\rwd\mytheme\template\catalog\category\subcategories.phtml
In order to reduce the initial load time of page, it is recommended to move all the JS includes in the <head> section of web page to the footer. Lets see how we can do it in Magento.
Step 1: Add Layout Updates
Create a child block of “before_body_end” named “foot” similar to the head block in local.xml file as shown below:
<?xml version="1.0" ?> <layout version="0.1.0"> <default> <reference name="before_body_end"> <block type="page/html_head" name="foot" as="foot" after="-" template="page/html/foot.phtml"/> </reference> </default> </layout>
There might have been a situation when you would have created a special category like “Sale Products” or “Featured Products”… and you had wanted to display products from these categories on some page like Home Pages using the CMS static block.
In order to achieve this you may create a CMS static block and add the following segment of code:
{{block type="catalog/product_list" name="product_list" category_id="2" column_count="4" template="catalog/product/list.phtml" }}
This will display the products listing page as a block on the page.
