thanks pauldodman.
I had realized something about the "$current_category" variable but your response was so fast, I didn't have enough time to discover that myself
Also, I would like to add something for the sake of some more tips from my part....
I have modified the home page so that it doesn't output the root categories initially. These are output when the visitor clicks on a "Our Products" hard-coded link in the navigation menu. For this, I injected a custom variable
$display_cats in the template code, with it's value set to "Y" when the visitor clicks on the "Our Products" link and the root categories display. So, since I want to differentiate the home page from this page also (i.e. the root categories display page), I also added the
$display_cats variable in the conditional statement of smarty,so the code knows that the home page is displayed, and not the page which displays the root categories, i.e.
Code:
$main eq "catalog" && $current_category.category eq "" && $display_cats ne "Y"
Thanks again...