Knowledgebase
How to configure the system catalog options in Magento
To change the system settings related to your catalog, log in to the admin panel of your Magento and go to System>Configuration>Catalog button in the Catalog section on the left. This will display on the right some panels with settings. In this article, due to the sheer number of catalog options, we'll briefly outline the settings in each of these panels. For a much more detailed description check out the tutorial on managing the system configuration catalog settings in Magento.
Frontend - from this panel you can select whether the grid or list mode should be the default one that displays products on category pages and whether both modes should be available or just one of them. You can configure how many products per page should be allowed in grid and list mode and you can specify the default number of products for each mode. You can also allow customers to view all products in the category on a single page, you can select which attribute should be used as the default one for ordering the products on category pages, and you can enable the use of flat catalog category and flat catalog product.
Sitemap - this panel has options from which you can select whether the links on the sitemap page should be listed using a tree-like structure and you can set the minimum lines per page.
Product Reviews - from the option in this panel you can choose whether to allow guests to write product reviews.
Product Alerts - using the options in this panel you can enable a couple of product alerts. One allows customers to sign up for changes in the price of a product. When the price of a product for which they have signed up is changed they are notified with an email. The other product alert informs those customers that have signed up for it that a product that was out of stock is back in stock again. You can also change the email templates used for these alerts.
Product Alerts Run Settings - from these settings you can configure how often should the product alerts be updated (daily, weekly or monthly), you can specify and error email address on which to receive error messages related to product alerts and you can also change the email template used for those messages.
Product Image Placeholders - from this panel you can change the image placeholders that are used when you don't upload images for a product(s). If you haven't uploaded images for a particular product to be displayed on category and product details pages, then the image placeholders are used.
Recently Viewed/Compared Products - with the settings in this panel you can change the scope for the recently viewed and recently compared sidebars, and you can set the maximum number of products to be shown in both sidebars.
Price - this panel contains a setting with which you can specify the scope of the base currency option.
Layered Navigation - from this panel you can choose whether the number of matching products should be displayed in brackets after the attributes in the layered navigation block. You can also configure how the price steps shown in the block should be calculated.
Category Top Navigation - this panel contains a setting with which you can set the depth to which subcategories should be shown in the top navigation menu. For example, you may want customers to be able to select only the top level categories from the top menu and not their subcategories.
Search Engine Optimizations - with these options you can select whether Magento should generate automatically a sitemap page, you can disable/enable the page that lists the popular search terms, you can change or remove the suffix ( e.g. .html) from the URLs of category and product pages. You can choose whether to put the name of the category to which a product belongs in the URL of the product page. You can enable/disable permanent redirects for those URLs for which you have change the URL key. You can change the default page title separator and you can enable the use of canonical link meta tag for categories and and products.
Catalog Search - with the options in this section you can change the allowed minimum and maximum length of search words/phrases. You can also set the maximum allowed words in a search phrase, and you can change the search type (Like search type displays partial and exact matches, while Fulltext returns as results only exact matches).
Downloadable Product Options - these options apply to the downloadable product type. You can change the order status that allows customers to download ordered products (Invoiced or Pending). You can limit the number of times that a customer can download the products that they have bought. You can allow guests to order downloadable products (in this case, in addition to enabling guest checkout with downloadable products, you also have to set the Shareable option to Yes).
Date & Time Custom Options - as the name implies, with the settings in this panel you can change some date and time format options.
For more details check out the Magento tutorial on the system configuration catalog settings.