Assigning Products to Catalog Categories

Question

I have a question related to this post:

Parent category is showing products in subcategories, even though product was not assigned to parent category

As in the post, let's assume that I have a Clothing category and that this category has a subcategory, T-shirts.

When defining or editing an Product via Catalog -> Manage Products -> click on the product to be modified -> Product Information -> Categories -> Product Categories what is the difference between the following scenarios:

1. I check the box next to Clothing.
2. I check the box next to T-Shirts.
3. I check both the box next to T-Shirts and the box next to Clothing.

Perhaps the most puzzling is the distinction between 2. and 3., because when I click a subcategory all of the ancestor categories don't automatically get ticked.

Thank you for your clarification.

Answer 1

The reason why it doesn't automatically check all of the 'T-Shirts' ancestors is because you might not want to have it show up in all of those categories. For example you might just want to have a few of the top selling t-shirts showing up in there along side for example some top selling pants to promote those items more instead of having ALL the sub products showing up in there.

For having the sub products to showe up in the ancestor categories 'automatically' you should use the Is Anchor functionality as explained in the article referenced in your question.