Cannot delete users from within admin

[_Vince]

In the end, the easiest and quickest thing was just to save the database, reload all of ZC, then import the saved database and template.

It's working now, except for a problem with the email, but that's a different story.

Thank you very much for all your help, people.

[lhungil]

... What I did was: export a copy of the 1.3x database import it onto the development machine's phpMyAdmin, then run the upgrade. After which, when the ZC was installed on the live server, I imported the upgraded DB. ...

This could be problematic. In some case phpMyAdmin can fail to fully export or import the data (depending upon selected settings and server configuration)... Sometimes using mysql_dump and similiar locally is more reliable.

Another potential problem can occur if the test environment does not exactly match the production environment. In Zen Cart 1.5.3+ the password encryption scheme can vary on different versions of PHP (resulting in failed logins / requiring admins and users reset passwords).

So basically, it is usually best practice to always backup the production DB (or copy to a staging DB) first. Then you can test the database upgrade and make any necessary file changes (and document - along with document any plugin installation and extra required steps). After everything looks good, one can then update the files on the production server (and run the database upgrade again against the production copy - and perform any database related changes identified during development on the test server).

The steps outlined in Rebuild on New Version tend to work best, especially when moving from one major version to another (for example from 1.3 to 1.5).

... Empty folder. It's a different server, which is why having old paths mentioned in the .log files is so odd. But I haven't actually seen any new .log files since this morning. Is this normal? Is there a limit to the number of .log files ZC will create? ...

No limit on the number of .log files Zen Cart will create (although some cheap hosting providers may limit the number of files allowed to be stored on a shared server).

If you are no longer receiving new log files related to the path issue, most likely it has been sorted. As we have now checked 90% of the places where the path could come from (and all appear good), I'd not worry about it. Could even have been the hosting provider caching some of the ".php" files (some providers do - and it can take awhile for changes to propagate).

... It wasn't really possible. The previous web person wasn't sure of what (if any) changes had been made, the site owner couldn't remember any. ...

One can always download a "clean" copy of the old version and compare all of the files against the files (from the old version) on the server. Kinda messy without a good comparison / merge tool, but there are some relatively inexpensive (and free) ones out there. While the article on "Troubleshooting Obscure Issues" is not an exact match, the basic process is outlined.

... I think I will reinstall everything and see what happens. It couldn't be any worse than it is right now.

In the end, the easiest and quickest thing was just to save the database, reload all of ZC, then import the saved database and template.

It's working now, except for a problem with the email, but that's a different story. ...

Glad you were able to get things sorted (and thank you for letting us know).

May want to look into converting the database tables to UTF8 after the upgrade, will avoid some potential issues if the store ever needs to support non latin-1 characters (or contains any content with non latin-1 characters). This can range from trivial (for a store previously only using latin-1 characters) to pain in the rear (multilingual stores using non latin-1 characters and multiple different character sets). Here is a related article: Should I Convert From iso-8859-1 to utf8?

Would strongly suggest using SMTPAUTH for your email (unless your provider blocks the necessary ports), much easier to debug and lower chance of emails being flagged as spam.


NOTE: My next step was going to be to ask you to install a "clean" copy of Zen Cart on the server in a new folder and database (with test data) to see if the same problems still occurred, or if there was an issue with something related to the current installation of Zen Cart (files + database). While Zen Cart usually will run on most modern hosting providers without any major issues, once in a blue moon (usually on really cheap providers) the hosting provider's environment is not compatible.