2022-05-18 - ocmod version of this plugin has been release

2022-04-30 - This extension is compliant with Journal3 (>= Journal version 3.1.4) and supports all versions of OpenCart 3.

The default OpenCart behaviour is to display active categories which have no products configured against them. This is not user-friendly at all because it means that users will constantly navigate to empty categories. It is possible using default OpenCart behaviour to return category counts which will indicate to the user which categories are empty, but this also introduces a noticeable performance overhead especially for stores with many categories (and sub-categories).

The purpose of this module is to EFFICIENTLY ensures that empty categories which have no products associated with them are not returned as part of category menus etc etc. You can now choose to:

• Display empty categories, i.e. categories that are defined but contain NO products
  
• Display categories with products which have no stock - For example when all the products in a specific category are sold out, you may choose to not display the category - this setting allows you to enable this behaviour.
  

Note: This extension is multi-store aware, so the above behaviour can be controlled on a per-store basis.

By installing this module you will now have a meaningful and streamlined category menu displaying only categories which are populated with actual active products for the current store.

After installation you will see two additional new config settings on the admin section, (System -> Setting -> Store -> Option -> Items):

• Hide empty categories from top-level menus
  
• Hide categories containing ONLY out of stock items
  

The plugin thus offers two types of operation:

• Real-time where the filtering is applied in real-time
  
• For the stores with many thousands of categories, the static filtering is suggested.
  

The module is targetted only at OpenCart 3.x.