Make Your Magento Categories Show Up

We continue to display the most bugging and frustrating issues with Magento store management. Today’s helping is about Magento categories that evidently love to try your nerves by not showing up where you want to see them.

What to do? Here are some tips from the gurus of Magento world.

Firstly, BoostingEcommerce advises to ask yourself these 4 crucial questions:

1. Is the “is active” option set to “yes” in the “general” tab?
2. Is the “include in navigation menu” option set to “yes” in the “general” tab?
3. Is the category that you have edited placed in the right position in the category tree?
4. Finally, if your category still does not show, maybe the reason is customizations? Turn off all custom code and set the store’s template to the default template, then check again.

So, what to do to make the categories show up? A couple of tips from Ashley Schroder:

1) Categories must be sub-categories of the root category

This one seems to catch most new Magento users, basically all new categories you add to your store should be children of your default category.

The reason for this notion of root categories is so that you can have entirely parallel category structures, made up of products from a shared inventory. These parallel category hierarchies can then be used for different store fronts. Each store has it’s own root category.

2) Root category must be specified for your Store

If you get a bit eager with your Magento store configuration and end up deleting the default root category, never fear, you can simply make a new Root category using the menu option. However you may also then need to re-associate that category with your default store (or any other store for which that category was the root). To do this you go the System > Manage Stores menu and drill-down to the Edit store screen as shown below.

3) Category cache may require a refresh

If you are still reading, things are getting a little grim I’m afraid. This solution is seldom required, and in turn, is rarely the solution. However, it’s worth a try right, otherwise you’ll end up kissing goodbye the next 30 minutes while you trawl the internet and the Magento forums searching for some other obscure solution.
Access the Cache Management screen (System > Cache Management) and tick all the boxes (for good measure), yes even the one labelled ‘beta’. Then choose Refresh from the drop down and save. You can see this in the screenshot below.

So, to sum up, here’s a to-check checklist from h-o.nl:

• Configure 'maximal depth' in the admin panel
• Set the root category as default category for your store view
• Check if all your categories are children of the root category
• Make sure your child categories are set to 'visible' and 'anchor' (if you want them to show you some products too)
• Try with flat categories turned on or off
• Refresh Caches
• Rebuild Indexes