Admin page won't load on fresh install/upgrade on Godaddy

I searched more than I have ever had to search for a resolution in my life on a Zen Cart issue, but found mostly awful irrelevant posts that were either unhelpful and/or completely irrelevant to the issue with the admin page not loading on a fresh upgrade and then isntall on a GoDaddy Linux hosting server. Again this thread is about a specific issue with my store's ZenCart admin page not loading and throwing the dreaded Server 500 error after upgrading zc from 1.50 to 1.54, and then finally giving up and installing zencart fresh on my godaddy hosted site. Before I go any further I hope this thread doesn't end up getting Hijacked like many other posts I found when searching for a fix to this issue by becoming an off-topic and irrelevant bashing of how bad GoDaddy sucks to host zencart on and merchant stores on in general. There is a reason the site is still hosted with goDaddy, but I am not going into it here because this post isn't about that or godaddy's quality of hosting services for merchant sites. I don't want to pollute this or any other post on a totally different subject like I saw time and time again on this forum and others when searching for a remedy to the admin page load issues/errors after upgrading and installing the latest zc version on a GoDaddy Linux server.

As previously mentioned I tried upgrading the site initially from 1.5.0 to 1.5.4, and got the entire customer facing store working with little snags and clean up tasks left to be done with a few add-ons that needed to be merged into the 1.5.4 code, but after renaming the zen cart admin folder I could never access the Admin page. Actually it turns out that renaming the admin folder had nothing to do with the admin page load issue whatsoever, but after trying to find a resolution to the issue and finding awful support topics that were either high jacked about GoDaddy as a hosting company or otherwise full of meaningless-irrelevant suggestions I gave up on the upgrade and tried installing 1.5.4 fresh like it was a brand new store being installed for the first time. I rigidly followed the installation instructions step by step, but it made no difference after the install was completed - the customer store front worked just fine, but the admin page would NOT load regardless of what I tried.

I finally stumbled across a great forum thread with the correct answer to the admin page loading issue that was written by Dr. Byte. Whoever you are Dr. Byte I want to thank you very much for sharing the correct fix to the zencart admin page load issue on GoDaddy Linux hosting servers. The reason I decided to put up a separate post was to drop many key word search combinations for this issue into a post that should rank high in future Google searches about this issue so that it saves some poor b@stard like me hours of their life banging their heads against the wall reading the same awful forum posts I did with ridiculous and meaningless information about this issue and how to fix it. The link to Dr. Bytes post is included below, but it came down to a very simple fix to get around the the available PHP versions supported by GoDaddy (5.2 or 5.3 at time of writing) and zencart version 1.5.4 being configured to work best with PHP versions 5.4 and up. As soon as I changed the word "static" to "self" on line 118 of "/admin/includes/classes/class.admin.zcObserverLogEventListener.php" the admin page immediately loaded and I could login to the admin panel to complete the configuration of the site. Here is the line in that file I changed from "static" to "self" -

$levels = self::$levels;

Here is the link to Dr. Bytes post that describes the issue and fix -

https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?215694-Known-Bugs-%28and-fixes%29-with-v1-5-4&p=1268233

Thanks again Dr. Byte for providing the resolution to the zen cart admin page loading error on GoDaddy! I hope this post helps others that run across this in the future save a lot of time and frustration trying to find the correct solution to the 1.54 admin page loading issues/errors on GoDaddy hosted sites...

cardioforce:

......but it came down to a very simple fix to get around the the available PHP versions supported by GoDaddy (5.2 or 5.3 at time of writing) and zencart version 1.5.4 being configured to work best with PHP versions 5.4 and up. As soon as I changed the word "static" to "self" on line 118 of "/admin/includes/classes/class.admin.zcObserverLogEventListener.php" the admin page immediately loaded and I could login to the admin panel to complete the configuration of the site. Here is the line in that file I changed from "static" to "self" -

$levels = self::$levels;

Here is the link to Dr. Bytes post that describes the issue and fix -

https://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?215694-Known-Bugs-%28and-fixes%29-with-v1-5-4&p=1268233

Thanks again Dr. Byte for providing the resolution to the zen cart admin page loading error on GoDaddy! I hope this post helps others that run across this in the future save a lot of time and frustration trying to find the correct solution to the 1.54 admin page loading issues/errors on GoDaddy hosted sites...

My simplest advice: find a host who provides up to date servers with a PHP selector in cPanel. With GoDaddy you buy cheap and you get cheap!

Despite the irrelevant ignorant vendor opinion in the first reply to this topic I must update the status of getting 1.5.4 working on servers that do not support the recommended zencart 1.5.4 PHP minimum version (5.5 or above). What I thought was the fix to the admin console issues in the original post was not a complete fix and due to not having an hour to go through every coding change and other steps attempted to resolve the 1.5.4 issues on < PHP v.5.5 servers I refer you to the relevant helpful recommendation in the first reply - go with an "... up to date server[] with a PHP selector in cPanel." If you try to upgrade or fresh install v1.5.4 on any PHP server environment less than the recommended PHP version 5.5 you will waste a lot of time and rip out a lot of hair trying to get the admin console and other aspects of zencart 1.5.4 to function properly.

The final fix that got my store back online and fully upgraded was indeed to upgrade my hosting account at GoDaddy to a modern server system with cPanel. AND it was incredibly easy to migrate and upgrade to 1.5.4 with GoDaddy and I can here the boos beginning - GoDaddy's migrate and update tool worked so unbelievably well, retaining all of my customization add-on modules, it was fkin awesome. Don't know any other way to put it. When I requested to upgrade to PHP version 5.5 I worked with one of the tech support reps who knew their sht and helped point me to the migrate-update tool. My site was migrated over to a new.mysite.com sub-domain on the new server system while my original site remained live on the old server. I then ran the zencart update tool that allowed me to point the tool at my old site, and proceeded an incremental upgrade from 1.5 to 1.51 to 1.52... to 1.54. When completed my entire zc database was ported over and the entire zc store was upgraded from 1.5 to 1.54 complete with all of the add-ons I have installed and all of the settings, etc. exactly mirroring my 1.5 live site. The only change I had to make was to the ..admin/includes/configure.php section shown as follows -

// * DIR_FS_* = Filesystem directories (local/physical)
define('DIR_FS_ADMIN', realpath(dirname(FILE) . '/../') . '/');
//the following path is a COMPLETE path to your Zen Cart files. eg: /var/www/vhost/accountname/public_html/store/
//define('DIR_FS_CATALOG', '/home/content/...rest/of/thepath/edited/tomatch/new/server/environment'); This is the old server path before migrating to new GoDaddy CPanel system

define('DIR_FS_CATALOG', '/home/myaccountname/public_html/store/');

define('DIR_FS_CATALOG_LANGUAGES', DIR_FS_CATALOG . 'includes/languages/');
define('DIR_FS_CATALOG_IMAGES', DIR_FS_CATALOG . 'images/');
define('DIR_FS_CATALOG_MODULES', DIR_FS_CATALOG . 'includes/modules/');
define('DIR_FS_CATALOG_TEMPLATES', DIR_FS_CATALOG . 'includes/templates/');
define('DIR_FS_BACKUP', DIR_FS_ADMIN . 'backups/');
define('DIR_FS_EMAIL_TEMPLATES', DIR_FS_CATALOG . 'email/');
define('DIR_FS_DOWNLOAD', DIR_FS_CATALOG . 'download/');

// define our database connection
define('DB_TYPE', 'mysql');
define('DB_PREFIX', 'zc_');
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_SERVER', 'localhost');
define('DB_SERVER_USERNAME', 'mydatabaseusername');
define('DB_SERVER_PASSWORD', 'mydatabasepasswordautosetbyupdater');
define('DB_DATABASE', 'mydatabasename');

The updater perfectly updated the store/includes/configure.php so I simply copied the above new server environment paths and database credentials into the store/admin/includes/configure.php file.

I have gone through my custom template and other code I am familiar with as a long time zencart admin and the GoDaddy migrate and update tool upgraded the database, code and settings, and all customizations I have made to the core zencart site over the years so perfectly (other than the admin configure.php) it blew my mind.

I'm not down with corporate america as much as anyone, but I call em like I see em and the GoDaddy cPanel server my store was migrated to and the update tool that migrated the database and entire store worked so incredibly well I will give credit where credit is due because it was bad ######. Boo and hiss all you want GD haters, I could care fkin less because I've made a sht load running my online business through them so bich and cry about the big bad GD all you want. I'm laugin all the way to the bank...

@cardioforce

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