Viewing products catalog

Products catalog management is one of the core tools of store back end.
In Shop-Script FREE products and categories management is performed in a combined department. Please take a look at the screenshot below: 

How to view category tree?

As described prior, category nesting is unlimited. To implement this we use recurrent function fillTheCList (recurrent means that this function calls itself within its body), which saves categories list into an array, and which is in its turn displayed in Smarty templates. Here is PHP source fragment (includes/admin/sub/catalog_products_categories.php file from Shop-Script FREE archive). I added few comments for you to better understand this technique:

<?php     function fillTheCList($parent, $level) //completely expand category tree and save it into array. Here $parent is currently processed category,and $level indicates category's sublevel:0 for root (core) categories, 1 for their subcategories, etc.     {         //select all subcategories of currently processed category         $q = db_query("SELECT categoryID, name, products_count, products_count_admin, parent FROM CATEGORY WHERE categoryID<>0 and parent=$parent ORDER BY name") or die (db_error());         $a = array(); //save fetched results into this array         //now process fetched results (subcategories)         while ($row = db_fetch_row($q))         {             //add 'level' information to subcategory details             $row[5] = $level;             //add subcategory to $a array             $a[] = $row;             //now recurrently call this function again to process all child categories             //of current category and save results to $b array             $b = fillTheCList($row[0], $level+1);             //add $b to the end of $a             for ($j=0; $j < count($b); $j++)             {                 $a[] = $b[$j];             }         }         return $a;     } //fillTheCList ?>

Now calling

	$categories = fillTheCList(0,0);

will save expanded categories tree into $categories array.
This array can be easily displayed in Smarty templates then (templates/tmpl1/admin/catalog_products_categories.tpl.html):

<table> {section name=i loop=$categories} <tr> <td> {section name=j loop=$categories[i].level max=$categories[i].level} {/section} <a href="admin.php?dpt=catalog&sub=products_categories&categoryID={$categories[i].categoryID}">{$categories[i].name}</a> </td> <td>({$categories[i].products_count})</td> <td align="right"> <font color="red">[</font> <a class="small" href="javascript:open_window('category.php?c_id={$categories[i].categoryID}',400,400);">edit</a> <font color="red">]</font> </td> </tr> {/section} </table>

Viewing product list

Viewing products is easier because they are stored in PRODUCT table without hierarchical structure. We only fetch products from the current category:

SELECT productID, name, customers_rating, Price, in_stock, picture, big_picture, thumbnail, items_sold, enabled, product_code FROM PRODUCT WHERE categoryID=`$current_categoryID`  ORDER BY name;

save results to $products array and present them on a webpage using Smarty:

Managing products & categories

To edit a certain category or product administrator clicks appropriate "Category edit" or "Product name" link.
Read about managing categories  and managing products.

Bringing products and categories in customer storefront  is much like it is done in back end.