Thread: Unpublished Categories such as Featured Items

In v8, we were using unpublished categories to manage our Featured Items display as well as to manage discount groupings - so a coupon would be restricted to a category. Because the category is administrative, and not useful to most customers, we left these categories unpublished.

In v9, it seems that if we do not publish a category, a product cannot be mapped to it. Is this correct? If so, what is the new recommended method to manage featured items and coupons that don't map to published categories?

I'm also interested in hearing a solution to this problem.

I have several products mapped to a Featured category for displaying on the home page, but I don't want the actual Featured category listing to display with the other categories.

I added some jquery script to hide the divs for categories that now have to be published but that I don't want to be part of my menu structure. Note that this particular script will get ANY LINK on the page with "featured.aspx" as part of the link.

HTML Code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jscripts/jquery-1.4.3.min.js"></script>
<script type = "text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $('a[href*="featured"]').parent().hide();
    });
</script>