Empty Category Messages

About the Extension

Why this plugin?

Empty categories are a common challenge in Shopware stores: seasonal assortment changes, temporarily sold-out product groups, or planned catalog expansions lead to categories without products. The default "No products found" message is unhelpful and can confuse customers.

With Empty Category Messages, you turn empty categories into informative pages with custom texts and images — directly via category settings, without touching a single template file.

Key Features

• Custom HTML Messages: Write formatted texts for each empty category
• Image Support: Choose images from the Media Manager in three sizes (small, medium, large)
• Flexible Alignment: Align text and image independently — left, center, or right
• Inheritance: Enable inheritance so subcategories automatically display the parent category's message — up to 10 levels deep
• Custom CSS Classes: Add your own CSS classes to match your theme's styling
• Multi-language: The message field supports all languages configured in your store

How It Works

After installation, you'll find a new section in category settings under "Custom Fields". There you configure:

1. The message as HTML text
2. Optionally an image with size and alignment
3. Text alignment
4. Optionally a CSS class
5. Whether subcategories should inherit this message

Whenever a category contains no products, your custom message is displayed instead of the default notice.

Use Cases

• Seasonal Assortments: "Our winter collection will be available again in October"
• Coming Soon: "We're stocking this category — check back soon!"
• Assortment Cleanup: "We've updated our range. Check out our alternatives" — with a link to other categories
• B2B Stores: Customer-group-dependent messages using Rule Builder in combination with category assignments

Important Notes

• The plugin overrides the Twig block element_product_listing_col_empty. Conflicts may occur if other plugins override the same block.
• Inheritance is limited to 10 levels to prevent performance issues with deep category trees.
• HTML content is sanitized via Shopware's sw_sanitize filter — unsafe tags are automatically removed.

Quality and Security

• 43 unit tests with PHPUnit 11
• PHPStan Level 6 — strict static analysis
• XSS protection for CSS classes via whitelist regex
• Efficient database queries: parent chain and media are each loaded in a single query

Documentation

Full documentation with installation guide, configuration examples, and styling tips is available in our online documentation.