'Content Categories' give you a way to classify the products in your store with regards to how they interact with your store design (i.e. the variables and layout selectors in your store).
This is different from categorising your products within sections (see Overview of Sections), and also different from the 'Product Groups' which are used for creating discounts (see Putting Products Into Groups).
Content categories are created in 'Design | Content Categories'. Content categories can be used for classifying all the different sorts of content item in your store (e.g. fragments, attributes, brochure pages etc.) and not just products. Every type of 'content item' is listed down the left hand side of this window. You can click on one of these items down the left in order to view/edit the content categories for this item.
When you have created a content category, you can then limit the settings that appear for that category within the 'Advanced Place of Setting' tab of your user-definable variables.
The sorts of things you can use content categories for are:
· When you create a new user-definable setting you can only have it appear for certain types of product. See below for an example.
· You can have pre-set specific layouts (see Editing Layout Selectors) for specific types of product.
· You can classify different sections with different categories, which then automatically affects the look of all the products in that section.
This is best illustrated with an example:
If you were selling both CDs and books you might wish to add an extra setting called 'Author' for your books and a setting called 'Artist' for your CDs.
For details on how to add a new setting, see Adding A New Variable.
Without using content categories, all your products (both books and CDs) would have both settings appearing all the time for them. By using content categories you can have the 'Author' setting appearing only for your books, and the 'Artist' setting appearing only for your CDs.
Here is how you would do the above example:
1. Go to 'Design | Content Categories' and select 'Product'.
2. Click 'New' and create a new category called 'Books'.
3. Click 'New' again and create a new category called 'CDs'.
4. Click 'OK'.
5. Create the new 'Artist' and 'Author' variables as described in Adding A New Variable.
6. Now edit the 'Artist' variable and go to the 'Advanced' tab.
7. In the 'Content Settings' tree click the '+' next to 'Product' to expand it.
8. De-select all categories other than 'CDs'.
9. Now go to the 'Advanced' tab of the 'Author' variable and de-select all categories within 'Product' other than 'Books'.
10. Click 'OK'
11. You can now assign the 'Books' or 'CDs' category to the products in your store. The 'Author' and 'Artist' settings will appear differently based on what category you select.
In Creating a List of Values to Select From, it talks about how you can create a list of choices for a variable.
It then describes at the end of the section how you can use content categories to limit the choices for this variable to only appear within certain content categories.