Anchor Categories and Simple/Config Products

Question

The Situation:

All my categories are anchor categories. I have a big category tree with several levels in my shop. I am using configurable products and associated simple products.

• Sometimes I put a configurable product into a category (e.g. when simple products have different prices) but not its simple products.

• Sometimes I put all the simple products into a category but not their parent configurable product.

The Issue:

Every product shows up in the right categories. In case a simple product is add to a category things on the product view page of that product are weird:

• The Breadcrumb doesn't show the correct tree path (home / product-name, instead of all the categories)
• The next-product button is not working.

Is this a bug? Can I solve this by rewriting a controller action?

Answer 1

What does the product URL look like? Is it:

• http://domain.com/category/tree/path/product.html
• http://domain.com/product.html
• http://domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/123?

You should check the configuration settings for: System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Use Categories Path for Product URLs

There could be an issue with the URL indexes, the template isn't using the proper method to get the correct URLs or a cookie/session issue.

Another thing to keep in mind that the URL/bread crumb path for the category will only be the be the actual category being viewed and not the ones being filtered on.

For example: http://demo.magentocommerce.com/apparel?cat=4

When viewing that URL the category is "Apparel" filtered by the "Shirts" child category. If you click on the "Coalesce: Functioning On Impatience T-Shirt" product (http://demo.magentocommerce.com/coalesce-functioning-on-impatience-t-shirt.html) the bread crumb will be: "Home / Apparel/ Coalesce: Functioning On Impatience T-Shirt".

Notice that "Shirts" is missing, one might think it should be there since the user is "viewing" the "Shirts" category (in a UX sense but not technical).