General Options

The 'General settings/General options' page allows you to adjust the general configuration of your store.

▪	Check this to close your shop temporarily: Use this option to close the storefront when performing maintenance tasks on your store or making changes to your store's settings/configuration. When this option is selected, no one can access the Customer zone of your store without a special key.

Important: You should understand that making changes on a live store without closing the storefront may cause temporary inconsistencies in the store's functioning, which may lead to undesirable consequences. For example, if you change the store's tax or shipping settings while some customers are checking out, these customers may get wrong order totals.

While the store is closed, visitors attempting to view any of the store's pages see a 'shop closed' page (shop_closed.html). If you wish to use a different HTML page as your 'shop closed' page, edit the $shop_closed_file variable in the config.php file of your X-Cart installation.

▪	Key for access to a temporarily closed shop: A key that can be used to access the Customer zone while the store is closed (e.g. If the key is'123', use http://www.yourhost.com/xcart/customer/home.php?shopkey=123 to access the Customer zone).

Important: for security reasons the key must never be the same as the master, FTP or MySQL password!

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If ticked, the categories list always shows root categories: If selected, root categories are shown in the Categories menu of the Customer zone regardless of what category level a customer is currently viewing. You can unselect this check box, so the categories list will always show categories available for browsing on the current level.

▪	Enable default password warning: If selected, a JavaScript warning is displayed to the store users who log in to the store with a password that coincides with the login name. The warning is supposed to be an irritating message that reminds the users of the necessity to change their password.

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Moderated sign-up for membership: If selected, customers are allowed to sign up for memberships, and administrator moderates the signup process (reviews each customer's application and decides whether the membership should be granted). As a result, customers become members of this or that group only with administrator's approval. You can uncheck this box if you wish to disable membership sign-up for customers (You will still be able to add them to membership groups besides the default group, but it will be outside of the view of your customers).

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Use JavaScript version for state and county selector: If selected, a JavaScript version of the state and county selector is enabled for all the forms where users are required to provide a billing/shipping address. You can leave this check box unselected if you do not wish to use the JavaScript version.

How it works with JavaScript version: The JavaScript version of X-Cart's state and county selector provides a mechanism that makes the process of specifying the state/county components of an address more user-friendly.

When a user selects a country from the 'Country' drop-down box in any address form, the JavaScript mechanism ensures that the 'State' drop-down box, from which the user is supposed to select a state, shows not all the states available in the store, but only the states of the country selected from the 'Country' drop-down box. Similarly, in stores that use counties, the list of counties displayed in the 'County' drop-down box includes not all the counties defined in the store, but just the counties of the state selected from the 'State' drop-down box. Please note that the situation described is true only for 1) countries that have their 'has states' check box selected and some states defined; 2) states that have some counties defined. If the user selects a country whose 'has states' box is selected, but for which no states are defined, an input box is provided for the 'State' field, so the customer can type in the name of his or her state manually. If the user selects a country whose 'has states' check box is not selected or a state that does not have any counties defined, the 'State' and 'County' fields are disabled, respectively.

How it works with non-JavaScript version: The 'State' drop-down box provides a list of all the states available in your store (the format of each entry in the list will be 'Country code: State name'). The 'County' drop-down box provides a list of all the counties available in your store in the format 'State name: County name'. Please note that 'has states' check boxes do not affect X-Cart's non-JavaScript state and county selector in any way.

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Return the customer to the dynamic part of the store if the option 'Redirect customer to cart' is disabled and the customer got to the cart page from the HTML-catalog: If selected, a customer who adds a product to the shopping cart from a static HTML catalog page is redirected to the dynamic part of the store. If unselected, the customer is redirected back to the static part of the store.

Note: Using this option makes sense only when the option 'Redirect customer to cart' is disabled.

Reason why you may want to enable this option: Assuming the option 'Redirect customer to cart' is disabled, customers do not get onto their personal cart page after adding a product to cart. When a customer cannot go to the cart page, the only way for him or her to find out how many product items are currently contained in the shopping cart is by looking at the product items counter in the 'Your cart' menu box. As the number of product items displayed in the 'Your cart' menu box can be updated only in a dynamic store, it makes sense to redirect customers to the dynamic part so they can see the updated number of items in their shopping cart.

Reason why you may want to disable this option: Load on the server where your store is installed can be reduced by having customer activity related to browsing categories and products relocated to the static part of your store (thus relieving the PHP and MySQL).

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Allow searching by individual words of a search phrase: If selected, store users (including customers) can specify whether the results returned by a product search should match 'All words', 'Any word' or the 'Exact phrase' of the search pattern. You might want to disable this option if you wish to reduce load on your MySQL server. With this option disabled, search results will include only exact matches of the search pattern.

▪	Default country: A country used as the country of residence of the default customer and displayed by default in the 'Country' field of user registration/user profile forms.

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When a customer isn't logged in, it is presumed that he is from the default country: If selected, the location defined by the values of the 'Default country/zipcode/state/city' fields is regarded as the place of residence of any anonymous customer. As a result, customers can get an estimate of shipping and tax costs for their orders even when they are not registered or not logged in. (For an anonymous customer, a shipping cost is calculated based on the shipping rate defined for the destination zone that includes the default customer location and the shipping method selected by the customer from the list of methods available for the default customer location; an applied tax is calculated based on the destination zone that includes the default customer location).

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Alternative currency symbol (empty to disable). Note that credit card charges are made using primary currency: A symbol that is used in your store to denote an alternative type of money in which prices may be expressed. If specified, all the prices in your store appear twice: first in the currency defined as primary and then in the currency defined as alternative.

Note: If you specify an alternative currency symbol, be sure to set an alternative currency exchange rate further in this section.

If you do not wish to use an alternative currency, leave the 'Alternative currency symbol' field blank.

▪	Alternative currency exchange rate: A conversion rate that is used by X-Cart to convert prices expressed in the primary currency to prices expressed in the alternative currency.

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Grams in the unit of weight defined by the weight symbol: A number of grams in the unit of weight used in your store (X-Cart needs this value to be able to convert weights expressed in the units of weight specified in the 'Weight symbol' field to the units of weight used by specific shipping services like U.S.P.S, FedEx, etc).

▪	Minimum allowed order subtotal: The minimum subtotal amount with which an order is accepted by your store (Customers are not allowed to place orders with a subtotal smaller than this value).

▪	Maximum allowed order subtotal (0 means no maximum limit): The maximum subtotal amount with which an order is accepted by your store (Customers are not allowed to place orders with a subtotal greater than this value).

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Maximum allowed total quantity of products in an order (0 means no maximum limit): The maximum number of product items a customer is allowed to order at a time (regardless of product titles). For example, if you set this value to 5, and a customer of yours attempts to order three books and three CDs, he or she will not be allowed to place the order.

▪	Disable inventory tracking: If selected, tracking of the number of product items in stock is disabled. You might want to disable inventory tracking only if the number of items in stock is unlimited for all the products in your store.

▪	Do not ask customers to enter CC information while getting registered: If selected, customers are not offered to provide their credit card information at the time of registration (The 'Credit card information' section in the user registration form is disabled).

▪	Enable 'Issue Number' and 'Valid from' fields in the CC info form: If selected, 'Issue No.' and 'Valid from' fields are included into the 'Credit card information' section.

▪	Display CVV2 input box at the last stage of checkout if Manual CC processing is used: If selected, an input box for CVV2 is included into the 'Credit card information' section when manual credit card processing is used.

▪	Enable Credit Card info validation: If selected, a special validation routine performs a preliminary check of compliance of the credit card number, CVV2 and expiration date provided by a customer with several different formatting rules.

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Enable debugging console: If selected, X-Cart's debugging console is enabled. X-Cart's debugging console is a tool that can show the hierarchy of templates on any of the store pages and, when Webmaster mode is enabled, can help you find specific templates. You can enable this option when customizing the look and feel of your store; be sure to disable the debugging console as soon as you finish editing the store templates.

▪	Enable tracking statistics: If selected, X-Cart gathers tracking statistics for your store ('Top paths through site', 'Top page views' and 'Shopping cart conversion funnel' sections are added to the 'Statistics' section of the administration back-end of your store).

▪	Parse Smarty tags in the content of embedded static pages: If selected, you can use Smarty tags in your embedded static pages. As a result, static pages using Smarty tags are treated not just as plain HTML pages, but as templates.

▪	The full path to Perl interpreter executable (e.g. WIN32: 'd:\perl\bin\perl.exe'; UNIX: '/usr/bin/perl' or leave this field empty): A full path to the Perl binary; set this value to be able to perform X-Cart upgrades on Windows operating systems.

▪	Preferred HTTPS module (if not found the first available module will be used): An HTTPS module that you wish to use for sending HTTPS queries (Net::SSLeay, CURL, libCURL, Open SSL executable, HTTPS-cli executable). Make sure the desired module is installed on the server.

Tip: To find out what HTTPS modules are installed, refer to the 'Environment info' section of the Summary page in the administration back-end (Administration menu->Summary).

If the module selected to be preferred is unavailable, X-Cart uses the first available HTTPS module that it can find.

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Display all dialogs for product editing on one page: If selected, all the dialog boxes pertaining to product modification ('Product details', 'International descriptions' and - depending on the set of enabled modules - all the other dialog boxes used for adjusting additional product features, like 'Product options', 'Detailed images', etc) appear on the same page.