beginner text edit question

[mc12345678]

OK, I downloaded & unzipped Zencart, uploaded (through Cyberduck) the index.php to replace home/pinewood/public_html/zencart/index.php
and when I look at index.php now in cPanel it is full of code. However, when I go to control panel and open 'online catalog'
http://pinewoodforge.com/zencart/index.php?main_page=
It now has no content & no code. The plot thickens!
thanks too for the education about different files with the same name, it do be confusing to a newby.

Have you tried without the ?main_page= part?

Just gone to your website, like http://pinewoodforge.com/zencart/ it is rare to see someone trying to go to an address like you posted with the main_page being blank.

Certainly got an error 500 when trying, so you're going to have to look through your error logs to identify what has gone wrong. My guess is that something else has been changed by playing around with the various files. As stevesh suggested, you want to settle in with what you are going to use to transfer files, and try to become familiar with what you have before making broad changes. Now that you are working towards having a store in a subdirectory, perhaps it or another sub-directory can become you're play with store, where changes made won't affect your live stable store.

[MnDel]

Have you tried without the ?main_page= part?


Certainly got an error 500 when trying, so you're going to have to look through your error logs to identify what has gone wrong. My guess is that something else has been changed by playing around with the various files. As stevesh suggested, you want to settle in with what you are going to use to transfer files, and try to become familiar with what you have before making broad changes. Now that you are working towards having a store in a subdirectory, perhaps it or another sub-directory can become you're play with store, where changes made won't affect your live stable store.

I have no idea how/ why the ?main_page= part? gets added, I just deleted it in browser back to
http://pinewoodforge.com/zencart/index.php and got the same blank result though.
I agree about needing to decide on a method, one person in this discussion suggested using Dreamweaver, and since I am familiar w/ it that's my first choice, but I think stevesh recommended against it......
I found a file called 'error logs' in cPanel, perhaps this is what you meant, sure enough it had gobs of 'does not exist' messages, such as:

[Sun Mar 02 19:56:37 2014] [error] [client 67.84.182.144] File does not exist: /home/pinewood/public_html/403.shtml, referer: https://www.google.com/

but nothing i could see that was useful. thanks, del

[mc12345678]

I have no idea how/ why the ?main_page= part? gets added, I just deleted it in browser back to
http://pinewoodforge.com/zencart/index.php and got the same blank result though.
I agree about needing to decide on a method, one person in this discussion suggested using Dreamweaver, and since I am familiar w/ it that's my first choice, but I think stevesh recommended against it......
I found a file called 'error logs' in cPanel, perhaps this is what you meant, sure enough it had gobs of 'does not exist' messages, such as:

[Sun Mar 02 19:56:37 2014] [error] [client 67.84.182.144] File does not exist: /home/pinewood/public_html/403.shtml, referer: https://www.google.com/

but nothing i could see that was useful. thanks, del

Because you're using ZC 1.5.1, error logs (assuming enough of the system has been loaded would be in the logs directory (/zencart/logs) if not, I almost recommend installing using that new download you got to replace the index.php file.

[MnDel]

OK, I see that perhaps the 'error logs' asked for meant just 'logs', it has loads of things called mydebug, but of course they're incomprehensible code anyway.
You've all been great trying to help me get going, I've no choice now but to dump and reload the whole system. But I have learned a lot, and have learned too that there are some real fine folks here.
thanks a million!