Shop Page to Use when Testing

Sometimes we want to test how the Shop or products pages look or work – with the products enabled for sale – but without having customers be able to view them and purchase them. There are three steps to this.

A. To achieve this, we make this page temporarily be the Shop page. That causes the products to disappear from the current semester’s page (e.g. Fall 2023) and show up on this page instead. (We don’t include this page in the menu, so customers wouldn’t be able to access it unless they knew the URL.)

B. We also need to hide the Featured Courses section on the home page, or customers would be able to access and buy courses from there.

C. And finally, we want customers to have a convenient link on the current semester’s page to our Course Information Booklet, while the course listings are not available to them.

Here’s how to make sure the Course Information Booklet is handy:

We want to make sure the hidden paragraph at the bottom of the current semesters page (the one that starts with “We are currently testing out this course ordering page…”) links to an up-to-date copy of the booklet.

  1. Copy of the URL of the booklet onto your clipboard.
  2. Click Pages.
  3. Click the current semester page (e.g. Fall 2023). This page is not designed in Beaver Builder. It had to be built with the WordPress Classic editor – the one that looks like Microsoft Word.
  4. Click the link in the last paragraph once.
  5. Paste the URL from your clipboard into the popup.
  6. Click the button that looks like a carriage return.
  7. Click the blue Update button to save the page.

Alison has created some custom CSS code which will hide the last paragraph of the semester page when it is the Shop page, and display the preceding paragraphs. When the page is not the shop page, only the last paragraph will display; the preceding paragraphs will be hidden.

Here’s how to show/hide the Featured Courses section.

  1. Visit the Home page and open it in Beaver Builder.
  2. Scroll to the row that includes Featured Courses and hover your mouse over that heading.
  3. On the grey box to the left (not the blue one), click the wrench icon.
  4. Click Row Settings.
  5. Click the Advanced tab.
  6. Where it says Display choose Never to hide the row or Always to display the row.
  7. Click Save in the popup.
  8. At the very top right of the page, click Done and Publish.

Here’s how to choose which page becomes the Shop page:

  1. Click WooCommerce.
  2. Click Settings.
  3. Click the Products tab.
  4. Click the General option (if you’re not already there).
  5. Where it says Shop page, choose the page you want as the Shop page from the dropdown. It will be either this page or your current semester page (e.g. Fall 2023).
  6. Scroll to the bottom and click the Save changes button.
  7. Click Pages and check that it now says – Shop Page by the desired page.