For those of you out there wondering how to remove that annoying banner that the CRE Loaded developers insert at the bottom of the page, I have found your solution.
Annoying
UPDATE: 2009-01-20: CRE Loaded SUCKS and is way too gimped by their own spam to make you upgrade to the NON-free version. Use Magento instead.
CRE Loaded is a pretty decent piece of open source (not any more) e-commerce software. Well, it’s pretty decent (not any more) if you ignore their MASSIVE use of global PHP variables. Nevertheless, it’s fast and relatively stable.
The Standard version is free; however, you need to register yearly for a key for it (dumb). One of the downsides to the free version is that they forcibly and slyly include this really annoying banner at the bottom of their templates (UPDATE: 2009-01-20: among other crappy things that make the software too annoying to use for a free version. Use Magento instead)
Now, the likely first reaction to fix this is to grep through their codebase for some of the text and/or HTML that’s in that bottom banner.
Well, to our surprise the CRE Loaded developers were a little smarter than that.
Fetched From Afar
If the text from the banner isn’t in the codebase and it isn’t in the database, where can it be?
Well if you happen to glance in your CRE Loaded install, you’ll find the following file:
<cre loaded dir>/includes/application_bottom.php
Inside that file, you’ll find the stuff that happens at the end of the request pipeline. You will also see a call to the suspicious method cre_uregisterBasicFunctions(). Needless to say this function is the culprit.
If you search the codebase for cre_uregisterBasicFunctions(), you will find its definition in the file <cre loaded dir>/includes/template_application_top.php (talk about a misdirection)
If you stare at method definition for a while, you will see it makes a remote request (via cURL or include) to http://www.creloaded.com/cre_google.js.html, which upon further inspection, contains the following text:
<div align="center">
<table width="700" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td><table width="720" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="4">
<tr>
<td colspan="4" class="main"><div align="center">This site is a member of the CRE Loaded Open Source <a href="http://www.creloaded.com/" target="_blank">Ecommerce Software</a> community</div></td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td width="25%" height="60" class="main"><p><a href="http://www.creloaded.com/" target="_blank"><u>Ecommerce Shopping Cart</u></a><br>
The scalability you demand.<br> The ease of use you want. <br>All the tools you need.</td>
<td width="25%" class="main"><a href="http://www.chainreactionweb.com/" target="_blank"><u>Shopping Cart Hosting </u></a><br>
Host your cart with CRW <br>for the industry's highest uptime and support. </td>
<td width="25%" class="main"><a href="http://www.creloaded.com/Shopping_Carts/c30/index.html" target="_blank"><u>FREE Shopping Cart </u></a><br>
Want to open a web store <br>on a budget? Start with our <br>unlimited FREE version. </td>
<td width="25%" class="main"><a href="https://www.crelance.com/" target="_blank"><u>Freelance Service Website </u></a><br>
Need feature or template work for CRE Webstore? <br>Hire a CRE Lance freelancer.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div align="center"><a href="http://www.creloaded.com/welcome_standard/home.php" target="_blank"> <img src="https://www.creloaded.com/cre_google.images/cre_loaded_ecommerce_logo30.gif" alt="CRE Loaded Commercial Open
Source Shopping Cart - opens in new window" width="168" height="30" vspace="3" border="0"></a></div></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
Those little tricksters!!!
The Fix
Since this is open source software, we can fix it legally!!!
Just comment out the call to cre_uregisterBasicFunctions().
File = application_bottom.php
// cre_uregisterBasicFunctions(); // <- COMMENT ME OUT
Now the banner is gone!
Loading ...
i did exactly what you said however now i get this error at the bottom part of my page.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘.’ in /mnt/w0802/d40/s21/b02f71f4/www/hazarabros.com/eshop/catalog/includes/application_bottom.php on line 15
@Alex I’m sorry. I put the
...in there to just mean “the rest of the code”, it’s not actually part of the code I’ll remove those for confusion.The file should look like this…
// close session (store variables) tep_session_close(); //cre_uregisterBasicFunctions(); if (STORE_PAGE_PARSE_TIME == 'true') {let me know how that works.
gosh!!!!! those little tricksters….after 2 days…finally got around it….thanks supper!! for the post…
Awesome post! I was wondering if you have found a way to comment out the web address and telephone info at the top of the template also??
Andy, after looking around a bit, I found the code where the whole top section printed in the templates. If you look in the file /templates/cre63_ats/header.php and examine lines 34-44 (roughly), you will see the ‘top_bar’ section enclosed in an if statement. Now you could just remove or comment out that whole section, or you could examine the conditions in the if statement…
<?php if (cre_site_branding('storeurl') != '' || cre_site_branding('phone') != '' || cre_site_branding('email') != ''){ ?>In there, you will notice that if all of the above branding items are empty strings, that whole section of code won’t get printed. The values that are being cross referenced are:
If you don’t want to blank those out, you can just comment it out or add some weird condition to the if statement like ‘if ( ( [insert previous statement] ) && false )’ or whatever.
Ah brilliant thankyou, I have tried that and it worked great. If I may I was wondering if I could pick your brains for a couple of other problems I am having:
1. When I installed CRE Loaded is decided which pages needed to be secured (I guess this is what happened when I checked the SSL bit), pages like My account I can understand, but it also put “New Products”, is that right? Is there a way of not making that secure e.g. changing it from https:// to http://
2. CRE Loaded seems to list products 10 to a page… is there anyway to make it 9 so I can get 3 rows of 3?
MANY THANKS
Andy.
1) Not sure how to place certain things in a SSL vs non-SSL fashion. I’m really not that familiar with CRE Loaded.
2) MAX_DISPLAY_SEARCH_RESULTS controls how many products (and other things) are displayed on lot of php pages. To change this, edit the Admin » Configuration » Search Results property from 10 to 9.
ah thanks again for your help, much apreciated
Much appreciated! I was used to the previous version of just removing some simple code for the banners at the bottom. this one had me a bit more stumped. I appreciate the help on locating the hidden culprit!
Hi
I have a small problem just wondering if I can get some help. I am using the latest Creloaded 6.4.1 and i would like to remove the link which is shown after checkout is complete which reads
“This order was powered by free cre loaded software”
Any ideas?
Excellent Post ty
I haven’t touched it in a while, but the way these things work is by using curl (or the like) to grab the text to be loaded from CRELoaded’s website. So my advice would be to look through the code for the checkout process. There is probably some way that ties the content in checkout_success.php to some freaking method just as you see above.
Thank you very much for the tip about the branding info. You saved me tons of time! I was searching through code instead of Admin options.