Sorry for the week-long hiatus on the blog. Had some problems when it was moved to the new host, and just had too many other things more important to deal with first! Hopefully we're all back in business now.

So, thought I'd just post a quickie today. It comes to mind since I recently was moving my own site and the issue always comes up, how can I prevent any new orders from coming in while I wait for the new DNS entries to propogate? You wouldn't want to just turn off the entire site and make it unavailable, the ideal thing is to still allow customers to browse you site and view content, but not create any orders that will be saved into the old database.

Well, luckily this is actually a very easy thing to do. If you open up the shoppingcheckoutdo_checkout.cfm page, you should see these two lines at the top:

We're going to use these to give the customer a notification when they try to checkout to come back later when the site has moved. Just change these two lines as follows (using whatever message you wish to give your customers):

Save your changes and your old store is now disabled from taking orders. Now, you may also want to prevent user registrations if your site is one that tends to get new users outside of the checkout process. This is also fairly easy to do. Open up the users/Fbx_Switch.cfm file and find the section for the fuseaction "register" around line 257 in the current version.) Comment out the following line in that section:

And replace it with your custom message, something like this:

Now your store is ready to be moved!