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Four groups of settings are listed under the 'General' tab of the 'General settings' section:
| • | Maintenance and operation options, |
| • | Administrator Zone settings and |
| • | Units of measurement settings. |
The maintenance and operation settings (Figure 3-4) are used to set the modes of operation of your store and include the following options:
| • | Maintenance mode - activating this mode makes the store inaccessible to visitors. Use this mode when you perform store maintenance tasks, make significant changes to the store design and configuration, or update the store catalog and do not want the visitors to observe your work in progress. Do not forget to switch the maintenance mode off (by removing the checkmark in the corresponding field) after you finish those tasks. |
Note: now when the store is closed for maintenance, the store administrator is able to access the Customer Zone in the same browser session.
| Note: | when the store is closed for maintenance, a 'Customer zone is closed for maintenance' message is displayed at the top of every page in Administrator zone. |
| • | Checkout desk operation mode main page - select 'Shopping cart' to use the dynamically generated shopping cart page as a main page. Select 'Static HTML page' for the customer to see a specially created static main page. |
| • | Safe mode – having this mode activated disables the initialization and operation of add-on modules installed at your store. This can be useful when diagnosing unexplainable run-time or configuration errors. Alternatively, the 'safe_mode=on' parameter can be appended to a page URL in the location field of your browser when accessing the Customer Zone in order to disable the modules. |
 Figure 3-4: Setting maintenance and operation options The Customer Zone settings (Figure 3-5) adjust various aspects of the catalog and shopping cart presentation and operation. The following options are defined here:
| • | Validate credit cards - checkmark this option to enable automatic verification of accuracy and validity of credit card numbers by using the checksum algorithm. |
| • | Display check number for eCheck payment method: - checkmark this option to show a 'Check number' field during checkout when offline eCheck payment method is used. |
| • | Category listings format - use this drop-down menu to define how to present category listings in the Customer Zone. |
| • | Show thumbnails in product list - when this option is switched on, thumbnail images of products are displayed next to product names in category listings. |
| • | Enable "Buy now" button in the product list - this option makes it possible to add products to the shopping cart right from category listings. When this option is switched off, a store visitor needs to access individual product page in order to add that product to his shopping cart. |
| • | Products per category listing page - LiteCommerce software automatically splits long product listings into separate pages. This option defines how many products can be displayed simultaneously in one page. |
| • | Allow direct URL access to products from disabled categories - select this option to allow products from disabled categories to be displayed in the "Featured products" and "Related products" lists, and allow direct access (for example, when a customer enters the URL directly into the browser address line). When this check box is empty, products from disabled categories will not be displayed anywhere in the customer area and will not be accessible by direct URL. |
| • | Show shipping rates & taxes to unregistered customers - when reviewing shopping cart contents, shoppers are shown calculated product taxes and shipping costs based on their location. Since the location of unregistered customers is unknown, they typically see the 'N/A' values in these fields. By enabling this option we assume that an unregistered customer comes from the default country and has the default zip/postal code, and calculate and display product taxes and shipping costs based on this assumption (see below for 'Default country in the registration form' and 'Default zip/postal code in the registration form' option details). |
| • | Enable anonymous checkout - enabling this option makes it possible for shoppers to purchase products at your store without registering customer accounts. |
| • | Minimum allowed order total, maximum allowed order total - lower and upper limits of acceptable order totals. Checkout is not allowed if the shopping cart total is out of the specified range. |
| • | Redirect customer to cart when adding a product - if this option is enabled, the customers is redirected to the shopping cart every time a product is being added to the cart, otherwise the customer stays in the last visited product list. |
| Note: | if this option is disabled and the customer has added a product to the cart using a direct link from outside the store (for example a partner site), then after the product has been added to cart, the customer will be redirected to the page, from which he has come. This means the customer will not be able to see his or her shopping cart. If this is the case the shop owner should provide redirection to the shopping cart. |
| • | Default country in the registration form, default zip/postal code in the registration form - these options define the default values of country and zip/postal code settings in the customer registration form. |
 Figure 3-5: Customer Zone settings The Administrator Zone settings (Figure 3-6) adjust various aspects of the Administrator Zone interface and operation. The following options are defined here:
| • | Products per page, users per page, orders per page - LiteCommerce software automatically splits long search results into separate pages. These options define how many product, user and order search matches can be displayed simultaneously in one page. |
| • | Amount of orders in the recent orders list - this option defines how many orders are to be shown in the automatically-generated 'Recent orders' list in the 'Orders' section. |
| • | Days to store last login data - this option specifies how many days the administrator login cookie must be stored in the administrator's browser. If the cookie is present in the browser, administrative e-mail address is substituted automatically in the Administrator Zone login screen. To disable this feature, set the option to '0' (zero). |
| • | Initial order number - this setting defines the minimal possible order number and can be adjusted for your convenience. |
| • | Enable extra fields in the category management dialogue - this option adds 'Extra fields' tab to 'Modify category' pages making it possible to review category-specific global extra fields. |
| • | Enable products to inherit extra fields from disabled categories - this option makes it possible for products listed in several categories (feature introduced by MultiCategories add-on module) to retain global extra options inherited from disabled categories. |
| • | Enable folding sidebar menus - this option makes it possible to fold unneeded sidebar menus in the Administrator Zone for ease of navigation (see Figure 3-1 as a sample). |
 Figure 3-6: Administrator Zone settings The Units of measurement section (Figure 3-7) contains the following settings:
| • | Weight unit – select the weight measurement unit. |
| • | Weight symbol – specify how product weight should be denoted in product pages. |
| • | Currency format – specify how product price should be displayed in product pages. '%s' code stands for product price amount. |
| • | Currency thousands delimiter, currency decimal delimiter - select the symbols to be used as thousands delimiter (separating thousands from hundreds) and decimal delimiter (separating fractional portion of the price from the whole number; in case of US currency, cents from dollars). |
| • | Date format – select one of the predefined time formats to be used. |
| • | Time format – select 12-hour or 24-hour format. |
 Figure 3-7: Setting units of measurement After you have modified the options in the 'General' tab, click on the 'Submit' button to save your changes.
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