“This category is empty” message in CMSMS Products module

I have a site where I’m using the products module. The company I’m doing it for runs specials every now and then, and wants them to show up as a page on the site. So what I did was create a category “specials”, and when a product is in that, it shows up on the products page.

However, as far as I know, there’s no default functionality to give a “This category is empty” message if there are no products in a category. And also, if a category is empty, the products module doesn’t render the template, so you can’t put some logic in there to display a “this category is empty” message.

So with a little bit of Smarty, this is how it’s done.

{capture assign="is_empty"}{Products category="Specials" summarytemplate="specials"}{/capture}
{if $is_empty != ''}{Products category="Specials" summarytemplate="specials"}{else}There are no specials on right now.{/if}

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