Categories

When category replacement is on, the plugin replaces {variable} placeholders in the following category fields:

• Name — also affects the main navigation and breadcrumbs
• Description
• Meta title
• Meta description

This is the highest-visibility scope. The category name flows into the top navigation that visitors see on every page, so a broken or empty variable is very loud.

Why it’s off by default

Turn on Enable variable replacement in categories in plugin settings only after you have:

• Decided which variables make sense for category copy.
• Restricted those variables’ Scopes to Category to prevent accidental leakage.
• Tested the storefront in every language you support.
• Tested with at least one empty variable value to confirm the fallback behaviour you expect.

Use cases

• Seasonal renaming — flip a campaign-specific suffix on {categorySuffix} to relabel a section of the menu (Outlet → Outlet — Black Friday).
• Channel-specific naming — combined with per-channel values, the same category can carry different display names per storefront.
• Promotional taglines in descriptions — write the category landing-page copy once and reuse it across categories that share a campaign.

Gotchas

• Navigation cache. Shopware caches navigation aggressively. After changing a variable used in a category name, clear the HTTP / object cache so the new name appears.
• URL slugs are not affected. Category SEO URLs are generated from the original name field, not the resolved value. Renaming via a variable does not change the URL — and that is usually what you want.
• Breadcrumbs respect the resolved name but rely on the navigation cache too — invalidate the cache after each change.