One of the features that has been missing and I have been waiting to see it in AbleCommerce is the “Featured Categories” feature. AbleCommerce allows you to define “Featured Products” but it does not allow you to define “Featured Categories”.
If implemented by AbleCommerce themselves it would have been pretty easy. They just needed to add one additional Boolean field to the ac_Categories table. “IsFeatured”. May be in the next version we will see this feature but in the mean time we need a customized solution for this. We don”t have the option of adding a new field to ac_Categories table. AbleCommerce Data Access Layer casino online (DAL) wont read it and it may even break.
AbleCommerce, however, does provide an alternate way of extending core tables. One can associate additional fields to any table in AbleCommerce using the Custom Fields. We have also used the custom fields feature to implement the featured categories add-on for AbleCommerce.
Here are some screen shots of how featured categories add-on in use.
Figure 1. Edit Category page has an additional check-box “Featured” available.
Figure 2. Featured Categories in side bar
Figure 3. Featured Categories in main content
You can get the featured categories add-on here.