On my client's site, some Define pages no longer work after upgrade to 1.5.1

[delia]

Also did have the problem with the products description but made the configure file changes to add the character set back in. However, didn't fix the define pages. I ended up downloading the main page file and editing it and reuploading and then it showed up in admin.

So I figured all I had to do was download, make changes and upload. Wrong.

I tried opening a file in cpanel, not in ut8f, and still no go.

Not all files affected, just the ones that have previously been edited in admin. Default files are fine and 2 new ones I added are okay - I would have edited those in text mode, not with an editor.

Any suggestions?

[Ajeh]

Are you receiving any errors on screen or in the debug log files?

[delia]

debug files gives me the same error that I get when there's a utf8 problem: htmlspecialchars() [<a href='function.htmlspecialchars'>function.htmlspecialchars</a>]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in /home/xxxxx/define_pages_editor.php on line 188

There's some of the identical kind for the general.php file but can't tell if that's from when I was playing with the define pages or was in reaction to something else

[lat9]

Prior to the upgrade, was the store using a latin1 character set? If so, there are a couple of places you'll need to "touch":

1. The two configure.php files (as you noted), adding the define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1'); statement.
2. All the english.php files (and other primary language files) to make sure that the CHARSET definition is not set to 'utf-8'.

[delia]

yes it was and I did make all the required changes. Not positive they worked - couldn't tell if firefox had cached it or what but still wasn't seeing changes so I did a unadvised thing - changed the character set for the product description and category description in the database. Then I saw that work.

I've seen it before where it didn't work or work well but I don't understand why the define pages would be affected since they are not saved in the database. I do know that when I edit files such as the define pages in cPanel file manager, I always open them as utf8 files. (it always gives you an option).

So would zen cart be opening them as latin1 or windows1251/2 (latin is not one of the options in cpanel)?

[lat9]

If the rest of the store is "latin1", then you should be editing/saving the define_page files as just regular ASCII. If the rest of the store is "utf-8", then you should be editing/saving the file as UTF8 without BOM.

[delia]

So if I open the define pages files with notepad and save and then upload as ascii, perhaps that will fix?

[lat9]

It's possible; a lot depends on whether your define pages use "special" characters or HTML symbols (e.g. &gt;). Opening the file and then saving it as an ASCII file might do the trick.

[delia]

well, it's certainly worth a try!

[delia]

No understanding of this necessarily, but what I ended up doing was simply copying the source code for each page that wasn't showing and pasting it into the define pages. All is working now. At first I deleted the code and uploaded an empty file but then I found out, I didn't even need to do that.