Guest Shopping Cart Failing After Upgrade

Good afternoon Zennners,

http://www.primevapor.com

Just got updated from 1.3.9a to 1.3.9h.

After the update, we've noticed the following issue with guest shopping carts.

As a first time website viewer, add an item to your shopping cart, and click continue shopping at the bottom of the shopping cart's page. Click anywhere else for that matter (except log-in or checkout) and the website will dump your shopping cart to emtpy. It will not carry the Zen ID to the different web-pages.

However, If you log-in with a valid account, it will work fine. If you log-out after having followed the previous steps, it will continue to work fine after you have initially logged in.

However, if your a first time user and you try to build a shopping cart, you run a good chance of having the entire cart dump your contents.

What in the 1.3.9h upgrade could have caused this? We had this updated completed through Numinex.

Thanks all!

Jonah Youngblood

That's not a known problem with 1.3.9h. So it must be something to do with how mods or customisations on your site are interacting with 1.3.9h, or something from your old version that hasn't carried across correctly.

Either way, if this wasn't a problem before the upgrade, but is now, your first call should be back to Numinex, as that's what you paid them to ensure didn't happen. Problems like this can happen in upgrades, but they're reputable and I'm sure they'd want the opportunity to fix it.

Surely whoever did your upgrade has some input on why it's not working?

Maybe your Rewritten URLs are broken?
Maybe your session code is broken by addons which have altered its behavior?
Maybe your site requires a different setting for the dot-prefix on the cookie domain? Or your URL rewriter is altering how session cookies are generated.

Further, your site's design is prone to complicate some of your symptoms because your navigation header menu doesn't properly generate a zenid when it's needed, unlike "many" (but not all) of your other links. Thus, if someone is visiting in a mode that's requiring the zenid be stuffed onto the URL, and they click on any of your header menu options, their entire session will be dumped because the links are hardcoded instead of being generated by zen_href_link.
Granted, if your session handling is working properly this template design flaw will be masked and much less likely to cause a problem.

Thank you both for your insightful replies. My boss seems to think it is a cookie problem that will dissipate with time.

His reply to this issue was:

"It has to do with the new style cookies used in the latest version of zen. All of us have old cookies lying about from prior testing.

Either dump your cache or go to private browsing and it should be fine."

I'm not currently aware of this, but I'm more of a designer than a developer so my ignorance with the subject could be clouding the solution.

The programmer that made the upgrade is based overseas and his English is poor. We'd prefer not to go back through him if possible.

Dr. Byte - I want to learn how to write these links with Zen's Href correctly. Can you give me a few examples on how I can go about writing in the correct Hrefs?

Some of my links are being pointed towards custom pages in the site. Is this something in the

includes/extra_datafiles/FILENAME.php

or

includes/languages/english/FILENAME.php

where I can see the variable that is being called for the Href? I'm aware of the difference in syntax that php uses for Hrefs linking, I'm just not sure what variable represents what page and how to decipher that accordingly.

I realize this isn't your job too, but any help will be much appreciated as I am the company code monkey.

Thank you for your time and assistance.

Take a look in /includes/templates/template_default/common/tpl_header.php for some zen_href_link usage examples.

Thanks for your help guys, I'll see what I can do with re-writing these links and I'll report on their success.

Much appreciated!