problems accessing shop admin

[parsley]

sigh...

it was going so well, been fighting solo for a few weeks doing my first zen cart install, managed to find most things i've struggled with either here or in the wiki but now i'm stumped.


Today I updated a few product images, created a few products and edited the stylesheet to change the page width. That's it. All worked fine.... except:


I no longer seem to be able to access the admin pages, all i get is a long wait and an empty index.php returned after a couple of minutes. The password/username seems to be checked ok (returns the appropriate message if i deliberately use an incorrect password), and I can see session info appearing in the session table via phpmyadmin, have checked configure.php in the admin/includes folder - all appears fine, have cleared out cookie and session info and retried and can see the session table being repopulated and the cookie is recreated ok, have reloaded the entire admin folder from a recent backup...

all with the same result...a long wait and a blank index.php returned.

i'm running out of ideas, spotted a couple of posts here regarding vaguely similar issues with php version 4.3.x, but my host is running 4.4.2.

my bottom lip is starting to quiver, a bit...any suggestions gratefully received

(here's the site btw ) (it's a work in progress, i'd have tarted it up a bit before posting here ... if i still could )

[parsley]

having just read the post before mine "Problems this morning - August 2nd 2007", I guess the initial problem could have coincided with the version check problems today, some of the symptoms cetainly sound similar... but they are still there even though the version check problems have been cleared up...

[parsley]

well ermm...

i changed "$version_check_index=true"; to false in index.php, and the admin page loaded fine.

i'm not really sure what's gone on there...but i'm not going to argue about it :)

edit: manually hitting the check for updates button in admin causes the same 'pause and nothing much else happens', as i was having previously. Can anyone confirm this is just my problem, or are there still problems with the version check system?

[DrByte]

1. The problem with the version-check system has cleared.

2. You don't need to edit any php code to turn off the version check. There's a switch in Admin->Configuration->My Store->Show version updates

[parsley]

ahh

but you can't change that if admin won't load

[DrByte]

right, and there's a second failsafe on this ... just edit the /admin/includes/local/skip_version_check.ini file and turn it off there too.

It's been discussed over and over on the forum and the FAQs ... which is why I didn't repeat it again in my last post.

[parsley]

well, thanks for your help anyway, i'll search harder before asking anything else.

(if i'd known that was the problem, i might have searched for it in the first place )

[DrByte]

Apologies -- I didn't mean to sound snarky ... the server problem was frustrating, and to have people going and turning important systems off as a result is equally frustrating.

Code changes are in progress (future version) for preventing the "hang" that has happened if the version server ever fails again. Hopefully it'll not be necessary, but if it does, it should no longer affect the admin.