Categories/Products

Note: If you are looking for the Categories screen showing products, please see this page.

The Categories/Products screen is a listing screen that allows you to view the products hierarchy for your store.

In order to add products to your site, you will first need at least one category.

Create a category by clicking the “new category” button.

Note: Products must be placed inside categories; products and categories cannot coexist at the same level. See products and categories at the same level.

Because of this rule, it is recommended that you have at least one category.

Now click on the newly created category and decide what you want to do.

Do you want the category to have a subcategory or do you want to add products to the category? Since you cannot have both products and categories in a category, it must contain one or the other. There is no restriction to how many products or categories you can have in a category, and there’s also no restriction to how many levels of subcategories you may have.

When you know what the category is to be used for, click the appropriate button to create a new product or a new category.

Categories Level

Generally at the top level of the store, you will have categories. Below this level, you may have sub-categories (possibly going several levels deep), eventually leading to a level of products only.

At the level where you only have categories, you’ll see a table with a number of rows that will look something like this:

admin categories

ID and Name

The first field on the left hand side is the numeric category ID.

Next to that is a field containing the category name, with two icons to the left of the name. The first icon will open the category in the storefront (allowing you to check the appearance of images and text related to the category), and the second icon, which is a file folder, indicates that this is a category. (If it were a product, that icon would not be present.)

Status Icons

Under the Status column header, you’ll see an icon that is either red or green, with an optional yellow icon.

  • Red means the category is disabled
  • Green means the category is enabled
  • Yellow means the category contains linked products

Action Icons

There are a series of action icons on the right.

Admin Category Listing Icons

These icons allow you to take the following actions:

Button Action
Pencil edit a category - update all the fields for a category
Trash Can delete a category - remove a category
M move a category - change the category’s place in the hierarchy
Asterisk use the category meta tags editor

Some of these icons change color depending on the category:

Button Meaning
orange star Category has custom meta tags
white star Category does not have custom meta tags

Products Level

If you are at a level where the Categories screen only shows products, you have a different set of capabilities. See Categories/Products (Products Level) page.

For more information on categories and products, see the categories and products pages.




Still have questions? Use the Search box in the upper right, or try the full list of FAQs. If you can't find it there, head over to the Zen Cart support forum and ask there in the appropriate subforum. In your post, please include your Zen Cart and PHP versions, and a link to your site.

Is there an error or omission on this page? Please post to General Questions on the support forum. Or, if you'd like to open a pull request, just review the guidelines and get started. You can even PR right here.
Last modified February 11, 2023 by Scott C Wilson (a76b8c4).