View the shop (by administrator) when in offline mode

[finbarr69]

Hmmm...  The point of being able to put the shop in offline mode should be that your customers cannot see your shop while you make changes to it, however you as administrator should surely be able to see the shop in order to determine if your maintenance is working.

At present (VM 2.0.8e) when the shop is in offline mode, even the administrator (Super User) cannot see the shop frontend.  Virtuemart is becoming a great product, but the way offline mode works just now is pretty much pointless because you can't modify products etc and see how they change in the frontend while hiding that from the customers.

May I suggest that it should work in the same way as Joomla's offline mode works which is that normal users see the offline message, but there is a login box provided.  If an administrator logs in, they can see the website as if it were online.  Virtuemart should work this way too.

As a workaround, I suspect the only way to achieve this is to make the virtuemart shop disappear from any menu items by changing the permissions to be only visible to administrators.  Any VM modules that appear would also need their permissions changed.

I would suggest that the developers look at this issue at some point to see if a way can be devised to allow the shop admins to see the frontend while it is offline to the customers. 

Brian

[Knerkin]

I'm astonished that there has been absolutely no response to Brian's post for nearly a year. Has there been any progress to a solution?

[Knerkin]

I had to solve this, so:
1. In Joomla's Menu system, set access to Virtuemart to special to restrict to administrators.
2. In Joomla's Module manager, set all VM-related modules to show only on Virtuemart pages.

DO NOT set the shop to be offline. Doing the above will show a logged-in administrator to see the shop normally.