AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I just installed a test version of Gold R6 on my laptop running under local host. Before running it I restored a backup of our production database. There were a few bumps in the installation but nothing I couldn't handle and little I couldn't explain (and fix before doing the production upgrade). I installed it as a 30 day demo since I haven't yet received the localhost license key I requested.

The problem I'm not sure how to solve is that at the end of the upgrade/installation it offers to take me to the admin page. The link looks good, it's "localhost:#####/admin/default.aspx" but when I click it I get taken to our production site admin page rather than the localhost version. I tried going to the store side of the Gold install and, while ugly, it does work and I can see our products there (without pictures because I haven't copied them into the test site yet). If I click the login link on the store pages I also get taken to the production site.

I looked in the store and settings tables and changed the references I found to our domain so they referred to localhost but that didn't fix it.

Any ideas? I'd love to dig in and start modifying the site to replace our production version but I'm a bit stumped if I can't get into the admin pages.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Try restarting the web site. I'm assuming that your 30 day demo key hasn't expired, but if it has, change the App_Data/AbleCommerce.config demo mode to true.
<item key="UseDemoMode" value="False" />

As explained by Judy enforcing demo mode from AbleCommerce.config should solve your problem.

Actually restarting my laptop fixed that problem. After the restart the default page on the site no longer worked though. It gave me a weird error message instead but every other page, including the admin, worked fine. Now the default page of the site works again but when I try to login I get redirected to the https version of the login page which fails since I don't have an ssl key installed. I guess I'll figure out how to enable ssl support on the dev server in visual studio and maybe everything will finally work at the same time. I also need to make another request for a localhost key since I didn't ever see a response to my first request.

You can change ssl settings in the store settings table.

Thanks, I reset that in the table and after a reboot it works. Now the whole store appears to be working correctly and I'm migrating all our customizations from the 7.0.6 version of the store. It's actually not nearly as bad to migrate as I feared it would be.

I believe, but have not fully confirmed, that the issue I was having with the default page not showing up correctly is related to whether or not I start Visual Studio as an administrator. It seems that the site has trouble if VS 2013 is run as admin. I still need to research that a bit to make sure it wasn't just a coincidence.

By the way, Visual Studio 2013 totally rocks for web development. BrowserLink is magic.