Behind The Code, with DrByte

Preamble

NOTE: This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and it is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for legal or compliance advice. For specific advice on how you are to comply with the GDPR, you should consult your own legal advisor.

Posted 25 May 2018.

The following is simply a general outline of things to consider related to GDPR as it affects a merchant who has downloaded and installed the Zen Cart application ...

This the 3rd in a series about readying your plugins for PHP 5.3, and for PHP 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6.

NOTE: This post assumes some pretty solid PHP knowledge, because all the changes listed will require adapting your code to find a new way to do whatever it was doing before.

NOTE: This is not the complete official list of changes. I've edited this list down to the basics, catering mostly to the topics that might affect people writing plugins for Zen Cart. For much more detailed ...

I frequently see people asking "Do I need SSL", and "How do I fix this SSL error?". There is some confusion in the meanings of the 2 parts that make SSL work, both in the front and back of the website.

There are 2 "levels"/"facets"/"parts"/"kinds" of SSL for a website:

a) Incoming traffic: The public-facing SSL certificate that drives https connections via a browser between your customer and your store. (ie: your ...

This is a follow-up post to my previous post about readying your plugins for PHP 5.3, this time addressing PHP 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6. Also check out the next one: for PHP 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3

NOTE: This post assumes some pretty solid PHP knowledge, because all the changes listed will require adapting your code to find a new way to do whatever it was doing before.

NOTE: This is not the complete official list of changes. I've edited this list down to the basics, catering mostly ...

Task:

• Storeowner wants to send the customer an email with a unique code when the customer creates an account.
• The code pattern is "ABC00001", where ABC is fixed text, and 00001 is the customer number, with leading zeros up to exactly 5 digits.
• There is no need to build a database of already-issued codes, since the customer ID number is already unique per customer.
• The store is using v1.5.0 code.

The thinking and coding process:
First, since this must ...

NOTE: UPDATED INFORMATION ABOUT UPGRADING CAN BE FOUND HERE:
https://docs.zen-cart.com/user/upgrading/


TL;DR / Executive Summary:
Are you looking for a quick way to understand best practices when upgrading your Zen Cart site? The easiest way to view it is as "a rebuild while keeping all the existing data."

This article contains 3 sections:
1. What an upgrade is, and what it is not.
2. An overview of how to rebuild a site using ...

(Also see the posts about readiness for PHP 5.4 and 5.5 and 5.6 and readiness for PHP 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 )

When PHP 5.3 was released, some older features were retired (some removed, some "deprecated", etc).

And if your custom code or your addons/plugins are using those features, things will break and you'll encounter the dreaded "white screen of death".

What do you need to change?

Here's the list I generally follow, along with ...