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

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?

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

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

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'.

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)?

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.

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

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

well, it's certainly worth a try!

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.