How to edit the "products" sidebar

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AllPro Provider
AllPro Provider
Joined: Wed Jun 01, 2016 1:49 pm
Website: www.coachclientconnection.com
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How to edit the "products" sidebar

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I would really appreciate having a way to directly edit or remove the "products" sidebar in the APWT purchasing process. As it is, it's more of a detriment than a help, for several reasons:

1. There's no visual differentiation between the product category headers and the products within those categories. This can confuse the client and lead them to click on an item that isn't even a product, which leads me to my second point...

2. Clicking on a category header takes the client to the website's home page, aborting the purchase process. :evil: :cry:

I believe these headers should either be unclickable, or take the client to a list of all the products in that category. They should definitely NOT take the client to a page unrelated to their current purchase, ESPECIALLY if the page in question opens in the same tab.

3. When creating a product, I'm FORCED to add a product category, even if I don't want that category - or that product - to show up in the sidebar.

This greatly reduces my ability to control what's displayed to my client during the purchase process. It basically means I have to delete everything I don't want every client to see (including products I'm using for test purchases or troubleshooting, or products that were specifically crafted for one person and aren't supposed to be publicly visible), or resign myself to having crap like "test product" show up in my "products" sidebar, which looks utterly unprofessional.

I appreciate the attempt to increase exposure of your users' products and encourage people to add more stuff to the cart, but the way it's currently executed - with no way (that I know of) for the user to edit or optimize it without potentially compromising necessary processes that are not related to the sidebar, such as test products that might be actively in use - is a recipe for confusion, frustration, damage to the seller's appearance of professionalism, and potentially lost sales.

If you could provide a way to manually choose which products and categories appear in this sidebar and which do not, and make the category headers visually distinct and unclickable, I'd very much appreciate it. Allowing us to brand it with our own colors and header styles, and add images and product descriptions, would probably also contribute to making it more appealing, though I think the headers and manual exclusion of products we don't want to display is more important.

Thanks for your consideration.
AllPro Provider
AllPro Provider
Website: www.allprowebtools.com

Re: How to edit the "products" sidebar

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The product sidebar can be removed by editing the template as follows:

1 - go to Settings -> Administrator from the main menu.
2 - Click on "Product Template" in the "Theme Editor" list
3. - Remove completely the line that says "<? product_sidebar($prodid); ?>"
4 - Press the "Save" button in the top right corner

You can repeat the above process by editing the "Login Template" and any other area where the Product Sidebar is showing up on your website.
Screenshot from 2022-10-19 09-36-09.png
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