suddenly my orders fail to post in orders admin (hosted on GoDaddy)

[addlink]

DrByte,
Disregard my questions above about 'changelogs' I found it on the forum. I also found steps for upgrading, combined with your suggestions I'm just going to go ahead and do the upgrade steps and switch my Pay Pal payment module back to my previous IPN settings when it was working.

I will keep you and others informed as to the outcome.
Thanks again!

[dbltoe]

While not the Dr's spokesperson, I would say that the most frustrating part of this forum is dealing with those who do not read answers and decide to go at it other than suggested or pointed to in a wiki/tutorial/FAQ.

The Dr is trying to give sage advice while dealing with misconceptions you have and are apparently unwilling to give up even when he debunks them.

Please re-read each of the Dr's post without any skimming or rushing. If you have to, do the '50s thing and diagram the sentence. The Dr has pointed out that:

1. PayPal Express can manage as many accounts as you can throw at it. I have five sites going to one account.
2. The problem is you server and will probably not be fixed by an upgrade of Zen Cart.
3. An upgrade of PayPal to Express will probably help.
4. An upgrade ANYTIME to the latest version of Zen Cart is DEFINITELY recommended and instructions are located in the downloaded zip and the Tutorials/FAQ.

Not mentioned by the Dr but added for general information:

• NEVER use any files to install or upgrade Zen Cart that do not come from zen-cart.com or sourceforge.com. Doing so WILL cause problems sooner or later.

Now, get to reading and Google any terms you're not familiar with.


Using this as a prefix to every Google search will get your information from the forum versus the outside world.

site:www.zen-cart.com

Be sure to follow it with a space as in "site:www.zen-cart.com PayPal Express multiple stores". Just that one search will get you over 7,000 responses
The first listing on the page gives the yes answer and it's from 2008!
So you see why we sometimes feel people are beating a dead horse when they ask the PayPal question.
I'm not saying take everything we say as gospel, but I would think the man that made PayPal work with Zen Cart just might know the answers.
Hang in there!

[DrByte]

"Wild West Domains" is GoDaddy. And that in itself explains the hosting headaches you're having. And could very well explain why things "suddenly" broke without warning. Their server management seems to be so out of control I doubt you could ever get a straight answer about any changes made to any server by anyone. I could be wrong, but the stars do seem to line up once in awhile.

Try going to Admin->Configuration->My Store->CURL Proxy Status ... set it to False.
It should already be set to False, but GoDaddy loves to do things differently.

[RodG]

And without a URL for your site all I can do is point you back to the people in control of server communications: your hosting company. The Zen Cart software is working just fine on tens of thousands of websites who do NOT have "(7) cannot connect to host" errors.

Who's your hosting company?

Probably not relevent, but over the weekend I had a few customers contact me about the ozpost shipping module which had suddenly stopped working. After a mad panic to see what had gone wrong I obtained the following data from the server

--------------------------------------------
This request could not be forwarded to the origin server or to any parent
caches. The most likely cause for this error is that the cache administrator
does not allow this cache to make direct connections to origin servers, and
all configured parent caches are currently unreachable.

Your cache administrator is [email protected].
------------------------------------------------

I also discovered that not only couldn't the affected stores reach the ozpost servers, they also couldn't reach PayPal or even the zen-cart server (for update notifications).

It was like this for about 3 days, and was only fixed yesterday.

As I say, probably not relevant in this case, but I mention it just in-case, and to also show that although it is easy to jump to conclusions into thinking zen-cart is the problem, it isn't the 'smart' thing to do ... More often than not such problems have nothing to do with ZenCart, but really are host related, even though nothing else seems amiss.

Cheers
Rod

[addlink]

DBLTOE,
Thank you for your input, but the statement "dealing with misconceptions you have and are apparently unwilling to give up even when he debunks them." is an understandable yet unfair assertion on your part. I am applying DrBytes pearls of wisdom as best I can under the circumstances.

I just rec'd an email from another zenner who told me DryByte told them there was a problem and it was being addressed. (?) However, they are apparently using v1.3.8, so maybe that applied only to that version. I have, as you suggest, very carefully read everything posted here. I am doing my best to apply it. The frustration is in getting it fixed as my hosting company insists it is ZenCart.

Rodg: Thanks for that input. Not sure what to do with it however.

DrByte: well hell, info about GoDaddy is not encouraging.
Okay, RE: Curl Proxy Status was set to "true" changed it to "false" and got "Does your host require that you use a proxy for cURL communication?" I have no idea about that question, but left it "false" anyway per your suggestion. I'll let you know if this changes anything in my "orders" issue. Thanks again everyone!

[addlink]

EVERYONE: FANTASTIC. ISSSUE RESOLVED!

DrByte's suggestion on changing the CURL Proxy Status seems to have resolved my issues. I am using PayPal Express Checkout.
After all this, what a simple fix! It was not the host server, it was a setting in Zen Cart that changed everything (that affected the server apparently). At least it appears working for now. Hope it holds.

I placed a download order, got through PayPal, returned to the store with the download link, got email notice from the store on the order and paypal payment notice, everything is back where it was before June 12, 2011.

One change. Amazing.
Thank you DrByte, you are the man! Thanks to everyone else as well on all your fine input.

[DrByte]

DrByte's suggestion on changing the CURL Proxy Status seems to have resolved my issues.
After all this, what a simple fix! It was not the host server, it was a setting in Zen Cart that changed everything (that affected the server apparently).

Actually, there is a very long ugly history with that. GoDaddy used to require a CURL Proxy be used for all CURL communications. So Zen Cart had to add that switch to turn on the CURL proxy.
Then GoDaddy changed their servers to no longer require the proxy.
But, GoDaddy left that setting turned on in their 1-click-install of Zen Cart, which evidently you used.

So, actually yes your problem really was your host server, exacerbated by a cludge that was added to Zen Cart to make it work with their systems, further complicated by their removal of all support for that cludge, thus resulting in your shop being broken.

One more reason why they're hated so much.

[dbltoe]

The Dr beat me too it

[addlink]

Very cool. You guys know your stuff.
Very interesting observation about GoDaddy (ugh)
Yes, I did install Zen Cart from within my hosting accounts "applications" back in October.

I sincerely hope this will help others who may have the same "broken store" issues involving GoDaddy.

The forum rocks, and saved the day for my store.
Thank you, thank you.