One website customer that I met recently wanted an eCommerce site to sell health food products. It seems that Herbalife allows their independent dealers to see products from a website as long as the prices are visible only to logged in members. After some Internet search I found that it is possible to show different HTML content to those who are logged in vs those who are not. The use if a simple PHP If/Else statement allows one to keep certain information only for logged in members.

The $logged variable is used to set the condition which will be be used depending on whether or not the visitor is logged in. By using the statement below the designer or developer has the power to show an alternative HTML content intended only for those who are logged in.

This information was not easily found in the Internet. The info was posted in the forums at prestashop.com. The man who posted this tip had attached some example Smarty templates to show how he had used this. The attachments had been pulled down and led to an error page. I had to do some digging around but was able to find the necessary steps in order to hide product prices from visitors until they log in. The fix is needed on most of the Smarty templates called product, product_list, product_comparison and a variety of product related pages and the template entitled homefeatured.

This tip is not rated for the beginner; I would rate it as an 8 on a scale of 1 – 10. Although I will say that none of my trial-and-error actions resulted in any permanent harm to the site. Be sure that you keep a good copy of each page to replace it if you foul it all up. Most of the time I simply change the name of the original by adding a couple of extra (xx) at the beginning of the file name. You can always delete the mistake and change the saved file back to the original name. I was pleased, at the end, that I had modified the site to accommodate the customer. I had changed the site so that product prices were hidden to all but the logged in members.