It is with a heavy heart I have decided to uninstall abantecart and go with wordpress. My personal reasons are:
1. When you build something for the better good of the public, and you do not charge, you become overwhelmed and it consumes your life. I believe AC has done a beautiful job building this framework and I think in the future it will grow more.

2. I am just one person. I closed my bakery a couple of months ago for good and now I am trying to start a new business online as passive income. I have a developer background and understand development pretty well, but I found I needed to do too many customized hacks in the core code in order to get close to what I wanted. This should not be necessary under most circumstances. I think this is just where AC needs more time to grow and evolve, maybe with some extra people who want to donate their time to the framework development. I, like many people asked questions but didn't get much support and help. Again, this is not a slight on the team, I understand the limitations to help people. But I will say, I saw some questions I had unanswered from years ago.

3. The final point was yesterday when I had to implement a separate checkout directly with PayPal for subscriptions. That is to say, it could not be integrated with the shopping cart, which changes the user experience.

Anyway, my issues are my issues, and certainly not yours. I think you have done a great job and you offer many great additions to help many people build sites the way they need to. So I hope you have not taken my words negatively.

Best wishes and stay safe

Hello, I found an old thread here about removing the zoom feature for a product but the link was broken.

I do not want to complicate things, I just do not have a need for the zoom and would like it completely removed.

Can someone please offer an easily implemented solution?

Thanks in advance

As difficult as it has been, I finally found a way to customize the menu. Programming is not hard, its understanding the framework that is the problem.

Instead of showing a category product, I wanted to create a single product that is custom. When clicking on the menu, I did not want a list of products to show up for this one item, just simple that customized product.

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WARNING: It is a hack. you should backup everything. If you do not know anything about HTML, etc. just do not do it. Once you write overtop the default files, there is no going back without a backup.

Note: I am doing this using the Parker Theme, so you wuold need to find the appropriate code for your theme, or the default. I have checked and the code is exactly the same, and located in the blocks folder

Note: this hack works for me because I have no subcategories to my custom menu item. That is to say, if you want a toplevel menu option without subcategories, this works. If you want the subcategories, you just need to add the code that is shown in the nested loop above to match that menu item you added. (no example provided since I did not need it, lo siento!) This would not be hard to do for your customized item.

and for the record, I do this under protest (I say that jokingly) but really there should be some flexibility with menu options, not just carts.

I do not take responsibility for this not working for you. I am just a guy trying to get my small website working so I can start my online business.

You HAVE been warned
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Custom Menu Hack Implementation

Step 1: turn off cache/and clear cache in order for your changes to be updated
   1.1   Dashboard > System > Settings > System
      Cache Enabled: Off
   1.2   Clear Cache
      Dashboard > System > Cache
      Select files to clear cache and click Clear Selected Cache Button

Step 2: add a product and get the url for that product. This product will be the placeholder for your custom menu item.
Ex: https://ifinallysolvedthemenuissue.com/index.php?rt=product/product&path=74&product_id=142


Step 3: Edit the following file, located in the blocks folder

category_top.tpl

You will notice there are two nested loops, first showing the category, then, attaching any subcategories to that category). At the bottom of the file you will find the following lines of code:

       </ul>
    </nav>
</section>

just above the closing of the unordered list " </ul>" is where you would add your custom menu item

something like this:
   <li><a href="https://ifinallysolvedthemenuissue.com/index.php?rt=product/product&path=74&product_id=142">New Menu Item 01</a></li>
   <li><a href="https://ifinallysolvedthemenuissue.com/index.php?rt=product/product&path=74&product_id=143">New Menu Item 02</a></li>

Save your changes and ftp them to your site.

UPDATE:
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If you want to highlight your currently created custom menus, here is another hack to add some code at the top to challenge which "category" you are using. Since my two categories do not exist I am just using their product ID's. This means, of course, they could never be deleted or used for something different, unless updating the code is what you would like. Really, if I had the time I would store this as data in a field associated with the product to automate it more, but I just need this to work for now. I do not have the time to devote to a full solution.

Starting near the top you will see this:
          <?php if ($categories) { ?>
             <?php

I added two string variables to hold the "current" style if it is passed, along with a boolean. If the product ID is one of these two, it will not be possible to be the other categories due to these products are not associated with those categories. I hope that makes sense.

I also want to point out, my implementation is not efficient code, but because I will not have sub categories and only a few in total, I saw no need to worry about this. I could have of course, but I am a bit lazy I admit

               $category124 =  '';
               $category125 =  '';
               $daveCustomCat = false;
               if ($_GET['product_id'] == "142") {
                  $category124 =  ' class="current" ';
                  $daveCustomCat = true;
               }elseif ($_GET['product_id'] == "143") {
                  $category125 =  ' class="current" ';
                  $daveCustomCat = true;
               }
            
               foreach ($categories as $category) {
                   if ($category['current']) {
                     if ($daveCustomCat===false){
                        $category['current'] = ' class="current" ';
                     }
                  } ?>


then where you added the two new <li> items you just add their respective variable
   <li <?php echo $category142 ?>"><a href="index.php?rt=product/product&path=74&product_id=142">New Menu Item 01</a></li>
   <li <?php echo $category143 ?>"><a href="index.php?rt=product/product&path=74&product_id=143">New Menu Item 02</a></li>

Hi, I did, and after your email to me, I am going to repurchase it again as I did manage to make it work. I am sorry for the pay-refund-repay

Hi, sorry for a stupid follow up question, but why would I need to reboot my PC?

I am not running this locally (thought that might be a bit faster). My site is not "live" so I am making my edit/updates/designing while it is in the shared environment with my hosting service.

I would to allow for comments on my About Us page. Is this possible? I purchased the extension DISQUS as it seemed to be what would work, but now I think it is either overkill, or not possible to put on one specific page.

Thanks in advance

Thanks for your reply.

Well, I am not sure. My horizontal menu at the top is my category list. So, it naturally seemed like the right thing to do for me to just add another category there and then add the fields I wanted.

My question is, how would I get a "page" to show up horizontally next to the categories if I were adding a page? A page seems to be the right way to go, but I want it naturally integrated in the navigation menu