Categories displaying large thumbnails and starting a category off on my main page.

New install of 1.3.8
Changed some CSS, turned some things off, moved a few things around and added a div to the main page.

I have searched the forum for a while and haven't been able to find anything that has actually resolved my issue. I am essentially attempting to recreate a somewhat similar design to bustedtees.com, in that I would like my t-shirts category to be displayed as the main page. Also, I only want thumbnails for that category to display on the main page... no extras!

I was able to display the t-shirts category as the main page but it was just a list of my shirts, and not really just the thumbnails like I would like it to be. I really don't want to have to put my shirts in categories that aren't what they actually are (like featuring them, etc). Do I need to create a new custom center box? If so please point me in the right direction as to what I would need to do to do this. I see a lot of people on the forum who are left wanting on that topic. Thanks for the help!

I can't think of any reason you couldn't just edit define_main_page.php using HTML to display images, each of which is linked to the particular t-shirt's product info page.

As a follow up to this post, I was able to to go into define_main_page.php and create a totally custom main page that displays my t-shirts. So, thanks for that. However, I am faced with a few new but related issues.

The problem is that I have more than just a t-shirt category. I need people to be able to navigate to the hoodies category page, which would be exactly the same as the tshirts page, but with different product. I thought about going back and duplicating index.php and changing it to... let's say... hoodies.php. From there I would modify the various files to call up something like define_hoodies_page.php and add the proper product there.

Then in my header.php file for my hoodies category link I would put shop/hoodies.php. Am I onto something, or is there a better way to go about it. I definitely think that the way that I am considering doing it will work, but is it the most efficient way? I'm not sure. Thanks again for the help.

Ok, right now I have a heavily modified template. I have basically turned off everything in my admin panel for my main page. I have, instead, added a few divs and some javascript to display images that represent the product and link to the individual products themselves. I included the javascript, the new divs, and the rest of my html in define_main_page.php. You can view the basic mock up at https://www.confrontclothing.com/shop

Now, I want the user to be able to navigate to the different categories, but I want it to look exactly the same as the main page. This is where my problem starts. I have read up a bit on EZ pages, but I don't think that it will really accomplish the same effect that I want it to have. I may be wrong, and just making this way too complicated, however. I think I can modify a few files to get the desired effect. There are a few files involved in this.

So far, the files that I think are involved are:
index.php
header_php.php
filenames.php
define_main_page.php

So far, I have copied index.php and renamed the copied file to tshirts.php. The idea behind this is that the user will click the TSHIRTS link and it will direct them to this file, which will call its own set of files that deal specifically with the tshirt content.

From there, it gets a bit iffy on what pages will load my new tshirt content. I think I am looking for files that call define_main_page.php. It looks to me like header_php.php is loaded on line 29 of the new TSHIRTS.PHP (index.php) file. In theory, I should be able to copy header_php.php and change it to something like tshirtheader_php.php. I would do this because header_php.php calls FILENAME_DEFINE_MAIN_PAGE which, from what I gather, loads the content of define_main_page.php.

So, I got into filenames.php and added FILENAME_DEFINE_TSHIRT_PAGE, and directed it to the file define_tshirt_page.php and uploaded it to its respective folder. I then put all of my new code dealing with the TSHIRT PRODUCT in define_tshirt_page.php and linked the images to their respective product id.

So, it should go like this -
USER clicks TSHIRT category link > Link leads to tshirts.php > tshirts.php calls tshirtheader_php.php on line 29 > tshirtheader_php.php calls filename_define_tshirt_page on line 43 > filename_define_tshirt_page is defined on filenames.php and leads to define_tshirt_page.php > define_tshirt_page.php contains all respective TSHIRT content

Any ideas on this? Sorry it is such a long read!

Ok, thanks for reading this everyone. My thoughts were correct. If you are going to do this, you have to make sure that you save your new header page (in my case, tshirtheader_php.php) to:

includes/modules/pages/index/

or else it wont work. I may find some flaws later, by doing it this way. If I do, I will make note of it in this thread. Still, let me know if you have any input! Thanks.