Need to hide a category

We have a category with products that we would like to limit to new members, allowing them to add to the cart until they have sucessfully checked out the first time.

Customer currently running 1.3.9h but can probably upgrade to 1.5.0 if need be.

More details:

The website is a co-op which charges a membership fee to new members (we are using one-time-membership). It adds a product to the cart and disables the ability of the customer to remove. That is working fine.

However we have a category with products that we would like to limit to new members, allowing them to add to the cart until they have sucessfully checked out the first time.

Any ideas on how to easily do this? I would like to actually hide the category rather than display it and not allow people to buy it.

An acceptable alternative would be to hide a product from a particular customer.

You could customize the function:

  function zen_get_buy_now_button($product_id, $link, $additional_link = false) {

in the file:
/includes/functions/functions_general.php

and check the master_categories_id of the Product and then check if the customer has an order yet ...

Are customers forced to login before they can add to cart?

We do not require customer login before adding to the cart.

We discussed the issue with the customer and that may have solved the problem. This is one of those cases where the customer is not always right :-)

If he continues to order from that category I'll modify the function you mentioned. Thanks.