Is there a way that would allow us to get around this limitation in the short term?
The USPS plugin is becoming more important because that organization is now offering non-expedited shipping that is cheaper than either UPS or FedEx. (Also, both of the latter charge for at-store pickups, but the USPS shows up everyday, gratis.)
To reiterate the situation, perhaps more clearly--
- The only payment option was the Paypal plugin, which had been enabled and working.
- The only shipping method enabled was one entry in the Manual shipping plugin. "MANUAL SHIPPING" had inserted itself into the "Shipping method" field of the Paypal plugin control page.
- Both plugins were working properly: shipping values were inserted into the price calculation; control was relayed to the Paypal Sandbox; and all operations completed successfully.
- On enabling the USPS plugin, the chosen shipping options for it were added correctly to the checkout page. After I had selected one of those options, the value of the selection was inserted into the calculation, the total charge was updated, and all appeared clear and good.
- Pressing 'Next' caused display of the banner message, stating "No payment methods found."
- And this is as far as it would progress.
I have gone ahead and wiped out this Joomla site, dropped the associated database, and reinstalled Joomla (2.5.4, same version as during the failure). I installed Akeeba Admin and Backup before any other extension, and will see if they can be used to help avoid problems, or at least provide a way of not having to wipe out the entire site to remove accumulated, apparently irremediable problems like this one. I have installed in this order: Joomla, Akeeba, JCE, Gantry Framework, HikaShop. I am hoping that this will leave HikaShop's installation as the final, overriding setup, as it is the largest and most complicated of any of the extensions.
This is the only problem I have found in trying out HikaShop Starter that is a show-stopper, keeping me from recommending the Business edition to clients. (I have looked at the PHP sources; however, without getting much more familiar with its flow, I cannot tell at the moment where any changes in the USPS plugin might be necessary.)
I will update this thread with the results of this present re-installation, so that you may have any further information about this situation.
Merci bien!