I am setting up my second Ultimate store for a client. We want to use the same categories and products on both sites. I cannot figure out how to do this in Ultimate 3.01.
My second store is blank of categories. How does one share categories (and their associated products) between stores. I do not want to recreate all those categories and then be forced to maintain two stores this way.
I thought of going into PHPMyAdmin and modifying the table data, but I hope it doesn't come to that.
Please help, I cannot imagine the cart is not capable of sharing categories and products between stores. That is the whole purpose of purchasing Ultimate.
[quote name='Triplets' timestamp='1342396530' post='140817']
Please help, I cannot imagine the cart is not capable of sharing categories and products between stores. That is the whole purpose of purchasing Ultimate.
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When you created the second store there were options to configure what information is copied / shared. This is a very small drop-down link under the heading “Copy Existing Store Information” and defaults to “none”. If you click this link you select which store information to copy and what to share.
Categories are not shared but can be copied during the additional storefront creation.
You can however share products - it does this by putting the products into both the new store catetory as well as the store it is being shared with (as each category is associated to one store a product is shared between stores). If you have already started making other changes and don't want to go back to installing a new storefront you can do this manually by adding the product into categories from different stores (just as you normally add categories to products).
There are lots of other settings which you configure to be automatically shared (or not) with an existing store when it is first created - promotions / shipping / payment methods / filters etc. Although they can be changed later, this copy / share option gets you 90% of the way there.
Hope that helps.
Thanks. I will delete the second store and try again. I do not recall seeing those settings the first time.
“[color=#282828][font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]Categories are not shared but can be copied during the additional storefront creation.”[/font][/color]
[font=“arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif”][color=“#282828”]I wish they could be shared. After we create 5 sites with the same data, maintaining them is going to be a mess. I though Ultimate would be able to handle the sharing of data better 
[/color][/font]
[quote name=‘Triplets’ timestamp=‘1342463088’ post=‘140888’]
Thanks. I will delete the second store and try again. I do not recall seeing those settings the first time.
“[color=#282828][font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif]Categories are not shared but can be copied during the additional storefront creation.”[/font][/color]
[font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif][color=#282828]I wish they could be shared. After we create 5 sites with the same data, maintaining them is going to be a mess. I though Ultimate would be able to handle the sharing of data better [/color][/font]
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No problem - the small “none” link is difficult to spot.
As far as I can tell - a category only has one location and I cannot see how to synchronise them between stores (no export / import??) - unlike products which you can assign to multiple categories from different stores. I guess this will add another layer of complexity if the product can be in multipe categories and categories in multiple stores (not sure I could cope with that just yet). I think the current way it is reasonably easy to understand the concept as it is so similar to the way the other versions work (products can already be associated with multiple categories - just in this case the categories can be from different stores).
I am not saying I fully understand it yet as a category has one location, but it also has a store setting. I can understand a root category requires a store (which you would logically select from the “location” drop down box not separately) - but having a separate “store” setting means you can have a sub-category of Store A with a store setting of Store B - which on testing I find the category doesn’t show on either store.
I think this is a bug but may be I haven’t understood why a sub-catetory would be assigned to a store (if it’s “location” is already defined) and there will be something changing in 3.02 to allow sub-categories to belong to multiple categories of different stores - in which case you would have a store setting as per the way products work with multiple category selections and one default store. Perhaps it will be more clear in 3.02.
I think there is a bug. Only the main categories copied over. It did not copy any of the subcategories. This does me no good at all.
Hello Triplets,
Thank you for your message.
Yes, this issue seems to be caused by a minor bug in standard CS-Cart. Please refer to this topic in our Bug tracker system in order to learn more information about how to fix this issue.
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Anastasiya Kozlova
CS-Cart Support team
Perfect. Thanks
You are welcome.
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Anastasiya Kozlova
CS-Cart Support team