Storefront

The storefront is the hub's catalogue: the products people browse, the purchasable variants of each product, and the collections that group them. It holds no cart and no orders — a shopper's basket, checkout and order history belong to the Cart component, which the storefront hands off to. This chapter covers the administrator's side; the Hub users book covers shopping.

Most hubs never open this component. It is off out of the box — the row written at install time leaves both Storefront and Cart disabled — and a hub that publishes datasets, runs tools and hosts groups has no use for either. Turn it on only when the hub genuinely sells something: a licensed code that members download after paying, a paid workshop place, a piece of hardware. If you are here because you want to give members a file, that is Resources or Publications, not this.

How these four components relate

Four components in this book deal with money, and they are two unrelated pairs. Knowing which is which saves an afternoon.

If you want	You need	And also
To sell products to members	Storefront — the catalogue	Cart — the basket, the checkout and the order record. Neither works alone; the storefront's product page calls into Cart to add an item, and Cart's screens read the catalogue back out of Storefront. Enable both or neither.
To run a job board where employers pay	Jobs — the board	Services — the employer subscriptions the board sells. Services exists only for Jobs; nothing else reads it.

The two pairs share no code, no tables and no checkout. Storefront and Cart do not sell a job-board subscription, and Services cannot sell a product. Enabling the store does not give you the job board, and vice versa.

Open it under Components > Storefront. Three sub-menu links sit at the top: Products, Collections, and Option Groups. Four more screens — SKUs, options, restrictions and serial numbers — are reached from inside those.

Some vocabulary. A product is the thing you sell, with a description and an image. An option group is a choice a buyer makes (Platform, License term); an option is one answer (Windows, Linux). A SKU is one purchasable combination of options, and carries the price, the inventory and, for software, the file. A collection is a category the store's front page and browse pages are built from.

Products

The list shows Title, Alias, Type, SKUs (published), State, and Access. Click a heading to sort. Filter by a search term and by product type. The SKU cell links to that product's SKUs and carries a [ + ] link that adds one. Click the state to publish or unpublish.

The toolbar has New, Edit, Delete, Publish, Unpublish, Options, and Help. Delete asks for confirmation on a second screen and is permanent.

Creating or editing a product

Field	Notes
Title	Required.
Alias	The last segment of the product's URL. A product with no alias is addressed by its numeric ID.
Tagline	Required. A one-line summary shown above the description.
Description	Required. The main body, in the editor.
Features	Optional second body block, shown below the description.
Type	The product type, from the #__storefront_product_types table. Only Software Download has extra settings; see below.
Allow multiple	Whether a buyer may put more than one in the cart.
Quantity text	Replaces the word "Quantity" on this product's page. Falls back to the component option, then to "Quantity".
State	Unpublished or Published.
Start Publishing, Finish Publishing	Optional window during which the product is visible.
Access Level, or access groups	See Access below.
Collections	Checkboxes for every published collection. A product may be in several.
Product option groups	Checkboxes for the option groups this product's SKUs choose from.
Image	Drag-and-drop upload, available only after the product is saved once.

Save the product before adding a type-related setting, a SKU, or a picture; the form says as much until the record exists.

For a Software Download product, an Edit type-related options link opens a meta screen with Is EULA Required?, the EULA text itself (which a SKU can override), and a Total Downloads Limit across all buyers. That screen also reports how many times the product has been downloaded.

Access

Which shoppers may buy a product is controlled one of two ways, chosen by the Product Access Control option.

With Access levels (the default), the product carries one ordinary Hubzero access level and the list shows it in the Access column.

With Access groups, the product's edit form instead offers two group trees: User is one of the following and User is not one of the following. Checking several groups combines them with OR, and the list column reads "User is: …" and "User is not: …". This is the mode hubs use to key licences to institutional attributes supplied by an authentication plugin.

SKUs

Reach a product's SKUs from the SKUs (published) column. The list shows Title, State, and Restrictions, with the same publish, edit, delete and new toolbar.

Field	Notes
Title	Required. The SKU name, shown in the cart and on orders.
Price	Required.
Weight	Shown only where shipping applies.
Checkout notes/comments message	A prompt shown to the buyer during checkout.
Checkout notes/comments required	Whether the buyer must answer it.
Product options	One menu per option group on the parent product. Saving fails if another SKU of the product already has the identical set of options; a product with no option groups can have only one published SKU.
Allow multiple	Whether more than one of this SKU may be bought at a time. Saving fails unless the parent product also allows it.
Track Inventory, Inventory	Count down stock as SKUs sell. Hidden when serial-number management is on, because serials are then the inventory.
Inventory notification threshold	Warn when stock falls to this level.
State	Unpublished or Published.
Start Publishing, Finish Publishing	Optional visibility window.
Restrict by users	Turns on the per-username permit list.

The information panel gives the SKU's ID, its parent product, its download count, and a Direct URL — a shareable link straight to the product page with this SKU's options preselected.

For software SKUs, a second block adds a per-SKU EULA that overrides the product's, the Download file name (required; the file itself is placed on the server under the configured download folder, not uploaded here), a Total Downloads Limit, and a Downloads Limit per Single User.

Serial numbers

Serial Number Management on a software SKU offers No management, Single Universal Number (one key given to every buyer, typed into Single Serial Number), or Multiple Unique Numbers. Choose the last, save, and a Manage multiple serial numbers link appears: add numbers one at a time or upload a CSV. Each number is handed out once and then marked used, which is why inventory tracking is taken over automatically. Set an inventory notification threshold so you hear about a shrinking pool.

Restrictions and whitelist

Setting Restrict by users to Yes and saving reveals a Manage restrictions link. There you add hub usernames, one list per SKU, by typing them or uploading a CSV; only those people may buy that SKU. A username that does not yet exist on the hub is stored anyway and attached to the account the first time that person logs in.

Manage whitelist is the opposite: an address on it gets the SKU regardless of every other access control or restriction.

Putting one product on sale

A lab wants to sell a licensed analysis code as a download, one price, no options. That is the smallest useful thing the store does, and it takes both halves of the component.

1. Put the file on the server, in the download folder named in Options. It is not uploaded through this interface, and a SKU that names a file which is not there saves happily and fails at the download.
2. Components > Storefront > Products, then New. Fill in Title, Tagline and Description — all three are required — set Type to Software Download, and press Save. Leave State at Unpublished for now.
3. Reopen the product. The image uploader and the type-related settings only appear once the record exists. Add the picture, and open Edit type-related options to set the EULA if the licence needs one.
4. Set Access Level, or the group trees if the hub is in access-group mode. This decides who can buy it, so get it right before publishing; see Access.
5. Tick the Collections the product belongs to. A product in no collection is reachable by its URL and by search, but appears on no browse page.
6. Save, then follow the SKUs (published) link and create one SKU: a Title, the Price, and under the software block the Download file name. With no option groups on the product, this SKU is the only one it can have.
7. Publish the SKU, then publish the product. Then check the store page from a test account or a private window rather than from your own session: the catalogue is filtered by the viewer's access levels, and yours are almost certainly wider than a member's.

Adding options later — a platform choice, a licence term — means adding an option group, ticking it on the product, and giving every combination its own SKU. Existing orders are unaffected; the catalogue changes underneath them.

Collections

Collections are the categories on the store's front page. The list shows Title, Alias, Type, and Published. A collection has only a Title, an Alias (both required), a published state, and an image. Every collection is saved with the type category.

Products join collections from the product's own edit form, not from here.

Option groups and options

The Option Groups list shows Title, Options (published), and Published. A group has a title and a published state; the options count links to that group's options, where each option likewise has just a title and a published state.

An unpublished option or option group disappears from the product page, which can leave a SKU unreachable — the SKU is still there, but no combination of visible options selects it.

The store on the site

The store lives at /storefront. Its home page lists the top-level collections; /storefront/browse/<collection> lists a collection's products; /storefront/product/<alias> is a product page; /storefront/search searches product titles. Every page carries a link to the cart.

Set Require Login to Yes to close the store to guests. A guest is then sent to /storefront/overview, which shows either a plain "log in to see the store" page or, if you give Landing page ID the numeric ID of a content article, that article with a Login button. Set that article's access to private so it cannot be read directly.

Options and permissions

Options holds the download and image folders, whether login is required, the landing page ID, the product access control mode, and the quantity label. Every option is listed in the configuration reference.

The Permissions tab sets who may configure the component (core.admin), reach its administrator screens (core.manage), and create, delete, edit, change the state of, or edit their own entries. access.xml also declares per-product, per-SKU, per-collection, per-option-group and per-option sections, but the screens all evaluate permissions at the component level.