Categories as well as products not showing

Question

I'm using magento 1.9.1 on my godaddy windows server and installed the istudio7 theme. In the description it says 1.8 is the last supported version. but in responses they say it works on 1.9 and on a later response it's said that they are working on 1.9 support so this is a little confusing.

I followed the instructions they sent me with the download and changed my package name under Configuration > general > design into istudio7 changed colors to my liking and added banner images/favicon/logo etc. This is all working fine.

Then I went on and imported the Default theme settings.

after that I created a custom block for my category and assigned my category and product to this. Deleted the cache and gave it a look on my site, but it isn't showing up in my menu bar and the product isn't being shown in the new products section. Actually the entire section isn't visible at all.

Does anyone have a clue of what I'm doing wrong? I already tried to assign the category to the standard menu block but this didn't change anything.

Answer 1

This sounds like you havn't configured your categories / products correctly, or else it should work in the default theme. I'd go a step back, configure your categories & products so they show in the default theme, then switch themes.

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Part2:

Normally a homepage will have different widgets showing latest products, imagesliders for promotions and anything else you want there to make the initial customer impression.

You can either edit your existing front page or create a new one, or use a category as the store front.

On the homepage you would have to configure or edit your cms front page via cms -> pages and insert a widget to show products of a certain category

eg:

{{block type="catalog/product_list" category_id="8" template="catalog/product/list.phtml"}}

Or if you wish to make a category your front page, get the category ID of the one you wish top make your store front and go to "System > Configuration > Web > Default Pages" and enter the following for the "Default web url" option: catalog/category/view/id/10 (where 10 is the id of the category).