Question

It is the first time I use Magento. I have installed Magento with a custom theme. When I add category and product from dashboard, they doesn’t show up on the website, just a blank content (header, sidebar and footer works fine, more precisely you can see it at here)

I found the added product from sitemap with css gone. What might be the reason for this? Why categories and content doesn’t appear on the website? Why css is broken on the product page?

Answer 1

Magento is designed to be as efficient as possible and the learning curve can initally be daunting to people encountering it for the first time. A couple things to try:

1. Make sure that the category you’ve created, found in Catalog > Categories > Manage Categories, the option “Include in Navigation Menu” set to yes (this should automatically “create” the navigation bar for you)
2. In the admin section of your site, navigate to System > Index Management and select all and reindex them all
3. In the admin section, navigate to System > Cache Management and flush the cache

The last two steps, when developing your site, are sometimes necessary to see the most up to date information on your Magento install. Something which may make your life easier is in the Cache Management page, select all of the cache types and choose to disable them for now. You’ll want to re-enable them once you make the site live.