From Shopp Documentation

All of these views are dynamically generated from information within your store's database. Each catalog view may be customized using Shopp theme templates to seamlessly integrate the shopping experience with your WordPress website.

The catalog includes 3 main views (or pages). The terms used here: views, pages, or screens are interchangeable and mean essentially the same thing. While not technically a true "page" in the way that WordPress uses a static "page", they all refer to a content layout provided by Shopp and delivered through the Shop (in the default installation) WordPress page. The catalog consists of the following views (or pages):

• Category Page
• Product Page
• Catalog Landing Page

The catalog in Shopp includes two basic elements: categories and products. Before you can understand how the default catalog landing page is arranged, you first need to understand how Shopp uses categories and products.

Categories

Categories in Shopp are simply a way to show a group of products. Categories are nothing more than a gallery of products - a group or a list of products. You might think of categories as a container of products. They can include as little as one product to as many as you'd like. Categories can be custom or dynamic. Both types of categories use the same category.php template file to show the products they "contain".

Category View Styles

The default category template shows products in a grid or list style. The initial style of listing products can be set in Shopp's Presentation Settings. The inital style only sets the first style the customer sees. The customer can use view controls to change the style to whatever they choose, after which every category is viewed using the customer's preference, not the Default View setting in Shopp.

Category Navigation

Categories are generally accessed through the Category Menu widget or by using the category-list Catalog Tag. For details, see the Navigation section below. In addition, the default category.php template file shows a navigation menu list of sub-categories of the current category (if any exist).

Custom Categories

Custom categories are categories that you create in your store. Products that you create are then assigned to your custom categories. You can set your own name, description, images, and other details when creating custom categories. Custom categories are hierarchical, meaning you can create sub-categories (or child categories) by specifying a parent category. There is (theoretically) no limit to the number of child categories or the levels of child categories you can create.

Templates

Custom categories can be setup with product templates for automatically generating certain product detail specs or pricing options. This can greatly speed up the data entry process when adding a number of similar products. When you define a template in a custom category, the information you specify in the category is copied to a product when you assign the product to that category.

Faceted Menus

A faceted menu is a specialized navigation and search tool to find and filter products according to specific product details or specs. The idea is to navigate through a collection of products by selecting and filtering "facets" of the products. Categories with detail templates can use the templates to build a faceted menu. The templates provide a common facet for all products assigned to the category to be filtered against.

Dynamic (Smart) Categories

Dynamic categories are built-in to Shopp and offer different ways to automatically group your products based on certain built-in factors such as showing a list of your best selling products, or newest products, or products that you have put on sale. Another way to say it, is that products are automatically assigned to the appropriate smart category based on the right conditions being met. There are several dynamic categories included in Shopp:

• Catalog Products
  A generic smart category that includes every product in your catalog.
• New Products
  Includes all of your products in your catalog automatically ordered by the most recently added product to your oldest product.
• Bestseller Products
  This category includes all of the products in your catalog automatically ordered by the products with the most recorded purchases. By default, it uses purchases across the lifetime of your store, beginning with the first purchase made at your store.
• Random Products
  Shows all of the products in your catalog in a random order.
• Featured Products
  Shows products that have the Featured setting enabled in the product editor and is automatically ordered by the most recently updated product.
• On Sale Products
  A showcase category for products that have a sale price (defined in the Product Editor) or a promotional discount (set by a Promotion) in effect. This category automatically sorts products by the most recently modified product.
• Tag Products
  Shows products that have a specific tag (custom taxonomy) assigned to them.
• Related Products
  Shows products related to the current product being viewed, or a specified product by the matching tags assigned to related products.
• Search Results
  Search results in Shopp are actually delivered through this smart category, showing products matching a keyword search automatically ordered by the most relevant product.

RSS Feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a data publishing format based on XML for easily distributing content across the Web. The Shopp catalog produces RSS feeds for categories and include all of the products of a given category, custom or dynamic. The web addresses for the feeds change depending on how your Shopp pages and site permalinks are configured. You can usually find the RSS feed links using an RSS-enabled web browser or by viewing the source code of a category page. In HTML/XHTML markup a feed URL will usually show up looking something like:

<link rel='alternate' type="application/rss+xml" title="New Products RSS Feed" href="http://wordpress/shop/feed/" />

Google Base
Shopp product RSS feeds can be used to broadcast your products to shopping services such as Google Product Search using the Google Base API. Shopp RSS feeds have been specifically enhanced to integrate with Google Base so you can register any of the Shopp-produced RSS feeds with Google. Read more about Setting Up Google Base

Products

An individual product includes numerous details. A product shows up in the catalog in a couple of ways. Most products are shown in a summarized format when displayed as part of a category listing defined in the category.php template file showing specific product information through Product Tags in a product loop. Clicking a product link from a category listing of the product generally provides access to the full product detail screen.

The product detail "page" is displayed using the layout specified in the product.php template file using Product Tags. The default product template displays the title of a product, the summary and full description, product pricing and variation options, the product image gallery, and product specification details.

The Catalog Landing

The catalog landing page is the main landing page of your store. It uses the layout specified in the catalog.php template file. The default template includes four dynamic categories set to show up to 3 products each and includes: Featured Products, On Sale Products, Bestseller Products and New Products (in that order).

You can easily change what is shown in your catalog landing page by Setting up Theme Templates and customizing your catalog.php template file to show specific products, or your own custom categories. You can do just about anything you can imagine with the Template API tags.

Navigation

There are several tools and ways to navigate the store. Categories provide the backbone of navigation by showing links to products. Navigating categories can be acheived by using the Category menu.

The category navigation menu does not appear automatically because of the complexity of keeping Shopp flexible enough to work with "any" theme. You can setup the category menu using sidebar widgets (if the WordPress theme you are using supports them) or by including a shopp() tag in your theme's sidebar.php file.

The category widget is by far the easiest to setup:

• In the WordPress admin, select the Design menu and then the Widgets sub-menu
• Here you will find the Shopp Categories widget in the list of available widgets (if your WordPress theme supports widgets)
• Simply click Add in the Shopp Categories widget listing to add it to your theme's sidebar
• You can edit the widget's options to change how it will appear in the sidebar

To add the category menu using the shopp() tag, edit your theme's sidebar.php file and add the following where you want the menu to appear:

<?php shopp('catalog','category-list'); ?>

This will produce an unordered list with list items containing links to the category pages. For more information about the categories-list shopp() tag, see Template Tags.