osCommerce allows only 32 characters for the Category name length. In order to allow for longer osCommerce category names you can simply update your database table.

There are two ways to do this.

The first is by using something like phpMyAdmin to increase the length of the categories_name field in the categories_description table.

If you’re a command line person, you can increase the length of your osCommerce category names by using the following:

ALTER TABLE `categories_description` CHANGE `categories_name` `categories_name` VARCHAR( 64 ) CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci NOT NULL

That’s it. Just updating the categories_description table will allow you to use longer category names with osCommerce.