Category ~ "Product-General" clarification

Hi, I have been reading and going back and forth between the board, wikidocs and my admin and I am more confused now than I was when I started looking for an answer to my question. So...I apologize in advance for this "dummy" question, but perhaps someone can clarify this just a bit:

I am completely confused between Category listings and the "Product-General" stuff I find in the Admin section.

To be a bit more specific, all I was trying to figure out was how to get my main categories to show on my home page (in the middle of course) along with their images (those are showing) and their short descriptions (which I have put in the Admin, but they are not showing on the page). You can see it here;
http://dolceboutique.com/store/

In my searching (over-searching?) I have now lost myself in the abundance of options of things to show/not show. So, I'm hoping someone can explain it a bit in plain terms.

Thank you!
k

PS. I just tried to post this one time but received a "server busy error. So, I'm trying it again... so here's hoping it doesn't post it more than once!

Does anyone have any information on this? Still haven't been able to find out how to get the descriptions of my main categories to show on the main page.

Thanks.
k

/includes/modules/pages/index/main_template_vars.php
around line 97 you see:```
} else {
$categories_query = "SELECT c.categories_id, cd.categories_name, c.categories_image, c.parent_id
FROM " . TABLE_CATEGORIES . " c, " . TABLE_CATEGORIES_DESCRIPTION . " cd
WHERE c.parent_id = :parentID
AND c.categories_id = cd.categories_id
AND cd.language_id = :languagesID
AND c.categories_status= '1'
ORDER BY sort_order, cd.categories_name";

$categories_query = $db->bindVars($categories_query, ':parentID', $current_category_id, 'integer');

change the second line of that like this:
$categories_query = "SELECT c.categories_id, cd.categories_name, c.categories_image, c.parent_id, cd.categories_description

Then ...
/includes/modules/YOURTEMPLATE/category_row.php
line 40:```
                                           'text' => '<a href="' . zen_href_link(FILENAME_DEFAULT, $cPath_new) . '">' . zen_image(DIR_WS_IMAGES . $categories->fields['categories_image'], $categories->fields['categories_name'], SUBCATEGORY_IMAGE_WIDTH, SUBCATEGORY_IMAGE_HEIGHT) . '<br />' . $categories->fields['categories_name'] . '</a>');
```becomes:```
                                           'text' => '<a href="' . zen_href_link(FILENAME_DEFAULT, $cPath_new) . '">' . zen_image(DIR_WS_IMAGES . $categories->fields['categories_image'], $categories->fields['categories_name'], SUBCATEGORY_IMAGE_WIDTH, SUBCATEGORY_IMAGE_HEIGHT) . '<br />' . $categories->fields['categories_name'] . '</a>' . '<br />' . $categories->fields['categories_description']);

Thank you for the information. Is there not a way to set this option from the admin? (with all the talk on the board, I'm afraid of changing too many pages for fear of having troubles of a seamless upgrade later).

Thanks.
k

krow:

Is there not a way to set this option from the admin?You are changing the normal way Zen Cart works, so there are no admin-selectable options for this.

Thanks for your quick response. I have done this and it put the descripts in place. Very nice. I have to go in and figure out how to format them now as they are all kind of caddy-whompus (is that a word?) about the page there.

This being done, it does leave me with a question please...

If I had to do this special snippet of code on these pages, why then does ZenCart allow one to put descriptions in the Admin when adding a new category? I'm a little confused as to why it would let me add those descriptions and then now show up on the site without special scripting.

Thanks,
k

The descriptions show up at the top of the category page.

If you click on a category, it brings up a listing of products/categories within that category. At the top of that listing, is your category description.

If that's not happening, then your category likely only has 1 product in it, and is going directly to the product rather than forcing the customer to view a list and have to click "again" to see the details. You can turn this behaviour off in Admin->configuration->Layout Settings->Skip 1-prod categories.

Gosh.. that was simply stated and perfectly correct. I'm going to go zen-out now to see if one day I get as good at ZenCart as you guys.

Thanks again,
k