'There are no products to list in this category' showing, but there are!

I keep getting the 'There are no products to list in this category.' response when looking at categories that definitely have items in them. This happens on and off (more the off). Any ideas what could cause it??

Are the products enabled? Have you mixed subcategories and products in the same category?

Nope, everything's structured as it should be. Annoyingly it's been working fine, but started doing it today. The only updates we've done are changing some prices and specials.

Often times, when this happens, there is something in the data that is stopping the display ...

Have you an URL where we could perhaps peek at where this is happening?

Does it "always" happen on the same Category consistently? Or is that random?

One of my older Zen clients is experiencing this same issue. They have an older version store (1.2.7) which had started breaking after they moved hosting a couple of times. In their case I am starting by backing up the database and running repairs, to see if there are any instances of data issues there that might be remedied.

If anyone has additional advice on what files to look at, I would appreciate it. In this site's case, all of the categories seem to be displaying the "no products to list" message, although there are products in the database for these categories. The featured and special products still display and you can arrive at those products pages in that way only.

If I have any progress I will post info here. We have been hired to try and help them fix their current site but if I cannot do so soon I may just recommend a rebuild in 1.3...

jacdesigner:

We have been hired to try and help them fix their current site but if I cannot do so soon I may just recommend a rebuild in 1.3...I would suggest that this should be your first recommendation rather than your fallback.

It's a bit of a wild punt, but i suspect that your client has caught up with a hosting company running PHP5 (as all good hosts should be, given that the last PHP release with 17 months ago and all support for it was withdrawn at the end of 2008).

Zen Cart 1.2.7 is even older (July 2007) as is not compatible with PHP5. So even if you manage to fix the specific problems, you're on a very slippery downward slope with problems likely to manifest themselves in very difficult to predict ways.

Thank you, Kuroi,

That is a good point. Their server does have both PHP5 and mysql5.

I am definitely recommending a rebuild of this site in the new version in my report, but for now I just have to do my best to repair what I can. So far I have successfully restored their Admin features and cleaned up their database. I am also running some patches which might help some.

You may find this a helpful source of specific things to look out for >> http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/migration5.incompatible.php.

If they're using PHP5.3 then you have a bigger problem still, and will need to take a look at the Zen Cart patch for dealing with that.

Best of luck.