Scheduled maintenance: moving the Zen Cart site to its new code base on 15 November

Hello everyone,

On Sunday, 15 November 2026, starting at about 12:00 UTC (midday), the site will be offline for maintenance while we move to a new code base. We expect the forums, plugin downloads, your account pages and the staff area to be unavailable for roughly 4–6 hours. We'll post here as soon as we're back.

A little history

For many years this site ran on vBulletin. Over the past year or so we worked on a replacement with a new site based on our own code. It began as a Symfony application and was developed into the Laravel application you use today (internally called lara-forum). It was built as a single private repository. It keeps your threads, posts, messages, accounts and memberships, and it holds the plugin library, memberships and billing, search and moderation tools.

As that work grew, it became clear that much of it was useful beyond Zen Cart, and that a single private code base was hard to maintain. In September 2026 we began rebuilding those parts, from scratch in new repositories, as Filagora, a set of open-source (MIT-licensed) packages. The new site is built on those packages, so the Zen Cart site is now the reference example of how to use them. The code is public at github.com/filagora and the Zen Cart implementation

Over the last few weeks we've ported every feature of the current site, compared the public pages, search, email and staff screens side by side, and rehearsed the move on a full copy of the production data.

This will also allow members of the Zen Cart community to directly contribute to the Zen Cart Support site.

What to expect

• The site shows a maintenance page during the move. While it's down, nothing can be posted, so there's no risk of losing a post.
• Plugin version checks from Zen Cart stores may fail or be slow during the window. Stores handle this normally and will retry later.
• Your login, posts, private messages, memberships and subscriptions all carry over.
• URLs stay the same, including the old vBulletin links.
• Some things stay as they are today on purpose. Old posts that contain leftover vBulletin formatting will look the same, and smileys written as :smile: won't render yet. We'd rather move first and improve afterwards.
• Search may be slightly behind for a short time after we return while its index catches up.

Afterwards

If you notice anything broken or different, please post in New Website Feedback with the page address and what you expected.

Thank you for your patience.