I’m setting up a Magento site and have some design requirements that we can’t quite get right. What is the best way to setup for the website, store, store view and then the categories for the needs below?
Overview:
- One domain name, one set of customers
- 3 similar product lines that appeal to different industries
Specific Requirements:
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The home page should show static content about the company and featured products from all three main categories of products
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Each main category of products should have a distinct visual design that carries through when looking at any of the products in those categories
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It should be seamless for customers to move from one category of products to another and have the design change without having to choose a store from a dropdown etc.
Home Page: Design A, any and all products may show.
Category 1: Design 1, products only from cat 1 show
Category 2: Design 2, products only from cat 2 show
Category 3: Design 3, products only from cat 3 show
Every combination of websites and stores and store views that we have tried results in strange behavior like changing a store and getting “There was no Home CMS page configured or found.” instead of seeing the unique design and category it should be showing. So far we can only get the designs to be different by making new CMS pages which doesn’t seem practical.
This seems like something that Magento is made to do and I have to be missing something.
Thank you for any help.
-Shane
Your design needs imply work and considerations from multiple areas of configuration. I’ll tackle them in turn. The tl;dr is that there may be more than one way to accomplish what you want, with the number of options at your disposal depending on your needs.
1) One domain name, one set of customers
Domain names (URLs) are configurable for all configuration scopes: Global (aka “Default”), Website, and Store (aka “Store View”). Ultimately, Magento configuration comes down to the most granular/specific scope, which is the store (“Store View”) scope. If a configuration value is not specified at the store scope, its value is derived (inherited) from the website or global scope.
Customers are configured to “belong” to all websites or to an individual website (
System > Configuration > Customer Configuration: Account Sharing Options). There is no out-of-box capability to restrict customers to a particular store.2) 3 similar product lines that appeal to different industries
Depends on things discussed below.
1) The home page should show static content about the company and featured products from all three main categories of products
Assuming that you are using the standard configuration of having the Mage_Cms module serve up the home page (
System > Web > Default Pages), that CMS page should be visible for all store views. CMS blocks and pages are restricted based on store. Now, later on in your post you mention that you see different behavior in the home page “instead of seeing the unique design and category it should be showing“, which indicates that you would like to have different but analogous content for each store’s home page. You can use one homepage to do this, but rather than specify content in the content area, you’ll need to include your content by specifying a block in Layout XML Update – this block will load a particular category based on the store.2) Each main category of products should have a distinct visual design that carries through when looking at any of the products in those categories
Establishing theme variants from global scope is possible at the website- and store-wide scopes. Theme variants can also be specified per CMS page, product, and category [each entity having a tab in its admin panel for effecting this change], with the latter having the option of “waterfalling” its custom theme settings to “child” categories and products. Which approach you take depends on your catalog hierarchy as well as the variations present in your themes.
It should be noted that if you need to present different category structure, or if you need to enable/disable products differently based on context, then you will be dealing with multiple websites. This is because category structure relies on root categories, and only websites are associated with root categories. As a reminder, “websites” in Magento have no implicit connection to distinct URLs, it’s just an unfortunate naming convention for a scope level.
3) It should be seamless for customers to move from one category of products to another and have the design change without having to choose a store from a dropdown etc.
Based on this final stated requirement, and assuming that you are relying on Magento’s native navigation, you are locked into one category structure, and will be using the approach of waterfalling category design, which you will set for each top-level main category under your single root using the “Custom Design” tab:
Another approach would be to create three distinct websites with distinct root categories and then build a menu by hand which links to each of the three stores, but I think this is less ideal based on your stated needs. You could also use one root category and then hide categories by website. Again, less likely that this will be appropriate for you.
Based on the information above you might end up clarifying or adding to your question. I’ll update my answer in response if necessary.