AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I am a web designer with a company that has an existing .com presence which is now trying to integrate a direct to consumer AC web-store as well. I do not have ftp access for the store side, and I am only allowed AC admin panel access. I have several questions which I have not found covered at all in the "tutorials" or chat support. I hope that some you in this community who are more familiar with this product, may have encountered some of these problems before, or at least, are able point me in the right direction.

1. trouble creating, and/or, publishing pages: when I tried to create a new page by adding a new product, the product page is listed in the admin catalog, and indicates "visible" but when i navigate to the store side, the page is invisible, and there are no links to the page. I have tried several different ways to create new pages, and it isn't working?

2. Permissions: are there different permission levels for admins? I have access to the admin sections, but some changes that I put in, don't effect the store, why?

3. Can I edit menu structures? if so, how?

4. Can I view the real source code, not just individual scripts of each page? if so, how?

If anyone can help, I would appreciate it. Thanks!

You really need to get access to the server via FTP or another method.

I'm a designer and it took about a week of playing around to really get the hang of how things work to the point of being able to customize the store. I hardly use the admin interface at all since it is geared towards people who don't know what they are doing in terms of code. I want to get into the code to customize my layout.

Before you start. Make sure you have Firefox and FireBug. Firebug will help you immensely.

Step #1 (after you get access to the server):
Duplicate the AbleCommerce theme and rename it.
Step #1a: In the admin, set teh store theme to your newly duplicated and renamed theme.
Then you can open the styles.css and go to town with alot of changes there for colors, background images etc.

Step #2:
To make a custom layout go into:
App_Data<Scriplets<Custom - there are various folders in there that have footer, header, sidebar layouts etc. The Content folder you can use to create custom content for other pages (such as an about us). Any files you put in there Name differently from anything in App_Data<Scriptlets<Default...

- While still logged into the site, on the storefront side and the bottom there is a dropdown with the options of View Page, Edit Page. Choose edit page, anything in your Custom folder from above will be available in the various drop downs.

Perhaps someone else can explain the Conlib thing better than me - I understand it but I don't know how to explain it. Hopefully that will get you started if you get access.

I think a huge bonus would be if AbleCommerce shipped with a "blank" theme. All the CSS files would have the classes & id's but no actual CSS info.

Hope that helps some.