Sidebox control is gone!

All of a sudden, I can't manage sideboxes via Layout Boxes Controller. I'll select a sidebox, set changes using 'edit', click the 'Update' button, the page refreshes, reports "Successfully Updated settings for box: shopping_cart.php" at the top, but the box remains unchanged. :huh: FYI, I've restarted, cleared cache, cookies, and even tried things on a different browser and multiple machines.

What the heck did I do? Help! :lamo:

https://store.ozurojewelry.com

Sincerely,
DanO

Is this just a problem with the shopping cart sidebox? Can you turn the categories and information side boxes on and off? It's clearly a 3rd party template (and I'm afraid a rather poorly constructed one - Template Monster?) - have you contacted the vendor to see what changes they made to how the sideboxes operate in that template. TM in particular have a tendency to write templates that simply ignore Zen Cart Admin settings.

Well, now I'm screwed. Based on your implications, I attempted to eliminate the accused - namely the template - by switching to the original, 'Classic Contemporary Green' template that comes with Zen Cart. Now I've essentially got NO template:
https://store.ozurojewelry.com

Here's the deal, if I try to make a 'subtractive' change within the admin panel -meaning, a change that first removes a setting/value and replaces it with another setting/value,) the first half works (the setting/value is removed,) however the second half doesn't work - the setting/value isn't repopulated. Please understand, this is just my logical analysis of the issue, as I'm trying to understand what's actually happening, and I'm hoping said analysis will help one of you to figure out what's wrong.

As indicated in my initial post (though admittedly, my current angle is based on 20/20 hindsight,) any time I tried to ACTIVATE a side box (which would be an addititive change, thankfully,) the box wasn't activated. Things continued on as they had before without any change. However, now we know that if I try to CHANGE a setting, such as what template I'd like to use, it appears to successfully deactivate the current template, but can't activate the new one.

Here's another example - I just went into the Admin/Configuration/Website Maintenance panel. "Display website maintenance period" was set to 'FALSE'. I clicked it, clicked 'Edit', changed the value to 'TRUE', and now there's no value at all:

Seems to me that should help someone experienced diagnose what's wrong..hopefully...it's just...a file...with bad permissions... At least I hope.

:frusty:

-Dan

This is very strange behaviour indeed. I can see why you are differentiating between additive and subtractive changes. It's a creative explanation of what you're seeing and appears to explain the evidence well. But it's not how Zen Cart actually works (even I suspect one as broken as yours appears to be currently).

Zen Cart sees the settings that you have been changing as switches. Some set to true of false (sometimes as strings rather than boolean values) and sometimes set to say "your template name", other times to "classic".

From your description, what it appears to me is happening is that each time you try to update one of these switches, the value is set to NULL.

To investigate this, do you have access to your database via a different route (e.g. phpMyAdmin). If so, can you go to the template_select table and post the results that you currently find there.