Apart from that the native XTC category image function has a further problem: The images have to be uploaded for each category. What next if you used a product image for a category and the product later possibly does’nt exist in this category anymore?

That’s why i prefer the automatic output of category images. Where do this images come from? They are product images from a product within the category.

While it’s quiet complicated to extend XTC with functions like these there is another relatively comfortable way: Through Smarty plugins.

The well documented and flexible parsing engine allows to use different plugins and to extend XTC without hacking any core files.

How does it work?

Step 1/2 – install the plugin

Download the Smarty plugin here and extract the file to the directory [XTC-Wurzelverzeichnis]/includes/classes/Smarty_2.6.14/plugins/ on your server.

Schritt 2/2 – Customise your template

Open the file

[XTC-root directory]/templates/[Your Template]/module/categorie_listing/categorie_listing.html

find this line

and comment it out. (Simply insert {* before and *} after)

After this line insert:

and save the file.

Ready

The attribute ready stands for the automatic output. It’s your choice to set it to true to output the image at random or to false to output first found image.

Attention: This script searches the database recursively for product images. So if you have a large amount of nested sub categorys without product images within you should not use this script for perfomance reasons.