box.navigation.php - $categories Variable

[NiteFox]

Afternoon all, 

I'm currently playing around  with creating a Bootstrap template and was wondering if anyone knows what the $categories variable produces in box.navigation.php and how to trigger it so i can see what gets outputted from a design point of view. Currently $navigation_tree is outputted which includes categories.

 

{if $CATEGORIES}
	{$CATEGORIES}
{else}
	{$NAVIGATION_TREE}
{/if}

 

Thanks,

 

[bsmither]

CubeCart will create and cache a skin-based rendering of the category tree, then make that "cameo" available to box.navigation.php in $CATEGORIES. The "pro" of this is to expend just once what could be a time-intensive task in building the tree. The "con" is that (at least for some versions of CubeCart) the URLs have the host address of the store when the tree was built. (Thus, should the web address change, the links do not work anymore.)

By adding {debug} to the end of the main.php template, you should see the $CATEGORIES variable in the left pane of the Smarty popup.

[NiteFox]

Cheers.