I have 4 categories set up in admin and nothing is showing up on my store. the front page is completely empty. when i click sitemap it says that there are no categories.
Try going to the backend. Under system > manage stores. You need to click on the store name (whatever you’ve called it or probably main website store if you haven’t changed it). Then you need to set the root category to be the top level of your categories (catalog would be it given the screen shot you’ve provided).
I was going to write that you can use ‘default category’ only for the root directory as I had exactly the same problem, but decided to test it again before saying anything.
The first time I setup the v1.0, I had the Default Category changed to something else by mistake as I was actually wanted to create a subcategory but mistakenly using the Root category, and I thought it didn’t matter the name, so I add a new subcategory, but the category menu didn’t show up at all even though I was sure I got everything correct and had cleared/disabled caches many time. The menu finally showed up after I deleted the subcategory first, then changed the name back to Default Category - it didn’t work when subcategory was still there.
Just now I tested again, change the Default Category to Catalog, and my menu is still there. I think there maybe a bug in Caches, the symptom is that the first time you setup subcategories, the parent category has to be named ‘Default Category’, so the the menu will show up; once you have it working, and have added new sub categories, then it’s ok to change the ‘Default Category’ to something else. My 2 cents hypothesis !
Neither do I, I think is a bit complicated for us noobies with magento just to set up a simple store, I have read about the front page on the cms with the code you have to paste to put new products but no it does not work.
Subscribing to this thread as I’ve never seen anything so confusing.
Here’s what I tried.
1. Install via dowloader
2. System->Manage Stores->Main Website Store (click)
3. Set Root Category to “Default Category”
4. System->Configuration->Inventory
5. Set Min Qty for items in stock = 1
6. Catalog->Manage Products
7. Product->Add Product->Simple->Filled out (name, desc., short desc, sku, weight, staus=enabled, visibility=cat/search)
8. Product->More->set (price & taxable goods)
9. Product->Inventory->set qty=1000, leave all others default.
10. Product->Categories->Default Category=checked
11. System->Cache->turn off all caching
10. Product->Inventory->Stock Availability=True
11. Product->Categories->Default Category=checked
12. System->Cache->Refresh>turn off all caching
#10 is particularly odd to me. I incorrectly assumed that when you added a product and set the stock to 1000 that it would be available to sell. Perhaps the “Stock Availability” could be a required field?
Thanks for the offer to login and check it out, but I’m on a local machine. When I installed on my shared host, logging into the admin would fail because I was using too much memory. Heck, couldn’t even run the setup script because the MySQL server complained of using too many resources.
I have been dealing with this issue for a few days now. I had just went through the steps as spelled out above, agian, when I got this error: http://www.glittercaps.com/magentocart/404/
Now it is all I get. I can not even log in any more.
This is really not turnning out well. Can any one help, Please?
@Jike : I think you should just leave alone the root category with no items (0). since it’s not going to show anything in homepage. and start by the 2nd level (below root)