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row promo_section, also Featured Products, also Latest Products: the brown font disappears against burlap background, recommend change font color to charcoal gray. 

If you anticipate sales only within USA, I recommend you remove the Currency drop-down menu: go to Design>Layouts, choose the layouts you are using for your various pages, open each of those layouts and turn off the Currency block you will see in each header section. 

I clicked a bunch of links, nothing broke.  Looks good!  Nice start!

Can you tell me how to remove the Fax field from checkout guest_step_1?

There is no specific call for this field in guest_step_1.tpl.  It is apparently part of a family of general form fields.  If a field is in the family, it will get called. 

I searched in default controller files, but could not find a way there to remove Fax from the family. 

It is not a required field, therefore should be easy to remove. 

Any help?

Thanks.

This thread was 3 yrs old!

1. Never allow registration, always Guest as buyer

The Checkout Process starts on an Account Login page where visitors choose between Guest Checkout and Registering.  We want to skip this step, and also eliminate all aspects of registration and membership on the site. 
Method: redirect checkout links to Guest Checkout process, remove "Guest" titles from guest checkout process so that it looks like a standard checkout.

Redirect all Checkout buttons to point directly at the 1st step of "Guest Checkout".
Cart Page:  Go to /template/pages/checkout/cart.tpl, change both instances of  '<?php echo $checkout_rt; ?>'  to  'checkout/guest_step_1'.  Lines 71 & 183. 

Cart-Top:  Go to id_1/template/blocks/cart_top.tpl, change line 29 instance of href="<?php echo $checkout; ?>"   to
href="/index.php?rt=checkout/guest_step_1".   Note: If the cart_top modification breaks when site is uploaded, it's probably a root directory reference issue.

Remove the "Guest Checkout" titles from the two GC pages. 
/pages/checkout/guest_step_1.tpl and also ...guest_step_2.tpl
Comment out line 2  <span class="maintext"><?php echo $heading_title; ?></span>  in both files.

The checkout pages have a potentially un-needed sub-total.  IF you don't charge shipping or taxes, there is no need to display a redundant sub-total. 
You can't hack the sub-total out of the code because it is a required element in computing the total.
You also cannot turn-off Subtotal in the Order Totals extension because this results in a zero-balance Total for any order.
So the solution is to "not display" the sub-total.
The sub-total on the guest pages is called by a loop in the order_summary block. 
You can remove the sub-total from the loop output with a single php line that says "only echo totals for which title not equal 'Sub-Total:' ". 
Method:
Open /blocks/order_summary.tpl
Insert <?php if($total['title'] != 'Sub-Total:') { ?> at line 30
Also insert <?php } ?> at line 36.

2. Never shipping options

Remove Shipping Selection element from guest_step_2:
Insert a new style in style.css: ~~line 272 - #active_shippings {display: none;} 

3. Never payment options

There is a default_cod payment extension included with AbanteCart. 

I have never used COD or attempted your 3rd goal, but that is where I would start. 

Good luck.  Hope this helps. 

This is my experience using xampp virtual server on win10:

The address for the backend is " sitename.com/?s=******* " , where the characters after the "?s=" are the Admin Section name that you specified during the setup routine.
This Admin access location address can be edited in system/config.php.
The "?s=" characters are required; everything after those characters is user specified.

The AbanteCart installer puts the site inside a public_html folder inside an abante-src-master folder inside the htdocs/sitename folder, which means that the full localhost url to the site will be:
sitename/abante-src-master/public_html/sitename.com/?s=********* . 

You can move the contents of the public_html folder "up" to the htdocs/sitename root. 
The site will then run on a typical shorter url: sitename.com/ .

After you move the site files, you'll have to access the backend by navigating to sitename.com/?s=******* ,
then go to System/Settings/Store Details and change the Store URL value to the new root location.

If you can study these name and path concepts to gain an understanding of the basic file structure, you can translate that understanding to your live site hosted on a paid server. 

Every host service is different in terms of where they locate site folders in relation to the root folder for your domain. 
Step 1 is to learn the file structure required by your host.  Does the site run from root, or does it run from public_html?  What is the location of public_html?  Is it on the root, or is it deeper? 
Step 2 is to configure your AbanteCart site file structure to accommodate your host and what you want.

At the end of the day, problems related to being unable to login in to admin on either a localhost or live server are almost always simple differences between the actual location of the site files and the specified location of the site files in config.sys or within the AbanteCart system settings. 

Think like this: you put the site files in Folder A, but your settings tell the server to look for the files in Folder B.  It is a simple fix.  Either relocate the files to Folder B, or change the settings to point the server at Folder A. 

Clear cache, and proceed..

Hope this helps. 

Thank you Basara and abolabo. 

I hope so...

Earlier today I noticed that unlike default layouts, user-created custom layouts have a little trashcan delete button.  That's nice. 

I edited every product to point each product at one single layout. 

Then i opened every unneeded layout clone and deleted it. 

Thanks for the suggestions and support.  It's great.

Thanks. 

I bumped wait_timeout to 180, then 360.  No change.

After reading more stackoverflow, I added similar connect_timeout and interactive_timeout values to amysqli.php, so i ended up looking like this:

      $connection->query("SET session connect_timeout=720;");
      $connection->query("SET session wait_timeout=720;");
      $connection->query("SET session interactive_timeout=720;");

Stackoverflow also led me to make more changes to php.ini.

I already had these settings:
max_execution_time=18000
max_input_time - 1200
memory_limit - 512M

I made these changes:
Uncomment two lines and increase values:
realpath_cache_size = 128k
realpath_cache_ttl = 1800
(I have no idea why these were commented out, but they never interfered with prior dev or backup of other CMS sites.)

Also:
default_socket_timeout=300
mysql.connect_timeout=300 -- on line 1199
mysql.connect_timeout=300 -- on line 2062
I don't know why there are two instances of the latter element.

I rebooted the virtual server and ran a backup.  It successfully finished all 3 steps in approx 3 minutes. 

Comments;
1 - The large time values, mem_limits and cache-sizes above are all recent changes I implemented after reading about how to make Abantecart run seamlessly.  Prior to my recent AC adventure, I never paid any attention to any of these values other than execution_time and memory_limit, and those two values were set much lower than what is recommended for AC.  So, if you have prior experience with other CMS apps, and are new to AC, you should anticipate making some changes like those described above. 

2 - The backup finished very quickly.  This suggests that the new amysqli timeouts or the uncommented caches or the slightly expanded php.ini timeouts were the solution.  I plan to reduce some of the values above back towards more conventional values. 

Thanks. 

Thanks for the reply. 

From the perspective of a new AbanteCart user: 
1 - The most efficient way to set up new products is to clone a similar product. 
2 - The clone feature is a time-saving and useful feature.
3 - The clone feature has an unexpected side effect: when it is used to clone a product that has a custom layout, it will add an un-needed Layout Copy to the roster of layouts.
4 - This will rapidly lead to a very long list of unnecessary Layout Clones, esp for large stores.

When a user encounters an unexpected outcome, it is not uncommon for that user to ask whether the outcome should have occurred.  I did that above.  It's easy to see that an ever-expanding list of Layout Clones is not a desirable side effect of an otherwise useful product setup feature. 

Sometimes this process can help identify a problem that has a reasonable probability of recurring with other users. 

I have one remaining question.  I would be great to get an answer...

After going back and reassigning a single layout to my products, is there a way to delete all the Layout Clones that I inadvertently created while using the Product Clone feature, so that my Layout list is not clogged with a large number of unneeded layout clones?

Thanks. 

I have many variations of each product, such as different colors, etc.  I use the same layout for each product. 

I used the Clone product button to set up most of my products.

I now have many Product Layouts under the Layout dropdown menu.  Each product has it's own layout. 

Since my store only has ~25 products to start out, I only have ~25 product layouts. 

But if the store grows to 500 products, I'll have 500 product layouts?  I only need one. 

Did the Clone Product function cause a new layout to be generated for each new product, or was it something else I did? 

I can edit each product and assign it to a master layout, but is there a way to remove all the (copy) layouts from the system?

Thanks.

When a question receives no answer, does it mean that the question was too dumb to acknowledge, or that the question was so challenging that no one knows the answer? 

I need to know this so that in the future, I will know how to interpret silence. 

Thanks!

Thank you Dmitriy. 

Noobs need support, too.

Your gentle and good-hearted condescension was not missed. :-)  More importantly, your suggestion was extremely helpful for this Noob. 

Based on your recommendation and some Noob experimentation, I succeeded in removing the Shipping Method element from the guest_step_2 page with the following css style:

#active_shippings {
display: none;
}

You can't imagine how helpful it is for inexperienced users when they receive simple answers to simple problems they encounter while trying to build a site with your application.   

Hi, can anyone help with this?

Is backup a functioning utility, or is everyone using manual backup, or ??

Thanks.

I'm using only one shipping method: default_free_shipping.
Auto Select is turned ON in the extension.
All of my products have free shipping turned ON.
I am only using Guest Checkout.  (I redirected all checkout buttons to guest_step_1).

When I get to guest_step_2 during the checkout process, there is a Shipping Method registerbox with a title and blurb and permanently selected radio button and redundant language about Free Shipping & Free. 

For a website that offers only one shipping method, this element has no purpose and may even interrupt seamless checkout flow.    I'd like to remove it. 

Is Auto Select supposed to remove it?   

Do you have any suggestions for how to completely remove the shipping selection element from the page?

I already tried deleting portions of guest_step_2.tpl, but I can't remove the registerbox without breaking the payment_method element.

Need some help...

Thanks.

Hi, thanks for the reply.

This is interesting because my site is xampp-only, new, and small.

There are no customers and no order history. 

It only has 8 extensions installed, and a total of 18 products. 

According to phpmyadmin, the database has 122 tables with a total size of 1.9MB. 

The total size of my /root/resources folder is 25MB. 

If I'm not mistaken, it seems unlikely that "database too big" is the cause of the problem. 

I'll do some research on how to backup manually,
but I would be grateful if you folks could investigate further and suggest other possible solutions. 

I would much prefer to use the system backup capabilities that are built into AC. 

Thanks.