Hi there,
I am implementing Magento Community edition and want to disable the "add to cart" functionality temporarily until i am prepared to proceed with online orders.
I wanted to use Magento without checkout and add to cart functionality.
Please advice. SIA
While there is no configuration switch to do just that, why don't you just comment out (php style) add to cart buttons from product/category pages and all links to checkout?
Note: it is not fully safe - someone can go to checkout URLs directly. Play with disabling shipping/payment methods so they cannot go through.
If you have Enterprise Edition, you can use category permissions feature to disable Buy or Show Price functionality per category.
The add to cart buttons are all held in their own file in template/catalog/product/view/addtocart.phtml. You could replace the buttons with a temporary message.
You can disable the onepage checkout in the configuration (System >> Configuration >> Sales >> Checkout >> Checkout Options >> Disable Onepage Checkout). I've just tested this, however, and Google Checkout remains, so it's not a solid solution.
There is an option to restrict the magento installation (including front end) with a whitelist of IP addresses. Login to the backend, go to System -> Configuration -> Advanced/Developer -> Developer Client Restrictions. Get your IP address by using a tool like this and then put that in the field. That will make it so that the site only works for computers coming from that IP address.
I like this solution better than the others mentioned here because there aren't any code changes needed. The drawback, of course is that you can't just show your website off to the world before you are ready to go live.
You could set the minimum order amount to 10million (or whatever) in the sales config - so when someone adds something to their cart you can have a custom message telling them the site is in test mode or whatever