Need some expert help with osCommerce

[Patrick Taylor]

I've been building a shop with osCommerce for the past three weeks. I like it very much, but no matter what I do, I can't get the page footer to load consistently. I've tried their forum without success (probably because I seem to be the only person with the problem). I'm wondering where to go from here, before I abandon the program and look elsewhere for a more reliable (but maybe less attractive and economical) shopping cart. I'm also waiting for my hosting provider to recompile Apache and PHP on my server, which I suppose might fix it in due course, assuming it's maybe a bug in PHP.

Do I need to face up to the fact that I should look for an expert, and pay for a fix? And how would I find the right person? And if I'm going to invest a lot of time and effort into the project, should I be looking for some kind of paid support anyway, given that I'm a designer and not a programmer?

Any wise advice would be appreciated. What do other people do in my situation?

Regards,

Patrick

[lorax]

Is the problem only with loading the footer? It either shows or it doesn't or are there any errors that get tripped?

[Patrick Taylor]

Thanks for replying.

Don't know if you're using osCommerce but here's the problem in more detail. After a week of trying to fix this, my footer still goes missing! I've completely uninstalled the whole of my osCommerce shop, database included, and reinstalled from scratch. Testing out the default shop anew, the problem was there again from the start, so it's unlikely to be any customization I've done. The symptom can best be described as follows:

As the catalog index page loads, I'm watching the Windows vertical scrollbar on the right. It goes to a certain height immediately on page load, and in the status bar I can see that product images are downloading into their nested table. Occasionally, when they've downloaded, the vertical scrollbar adjusts itself as the footer finally loads, but more than often than not, the footer fails to load, and in VIEW SOURCE I can see this final code right at the bottom:

... Disciples: Sacred Lands</a><br>$90.00</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

The code for the bottom of the page, including the footer, has failed to appear. The code above relates to the last loaded product info in a nested table above the footer. Now if I refresh the page, the footer miraculously appears. It's as if something is halting the page downloading properly beyond a certain point. There are no other errors. Originally the footer was in a required php file but I've actually hardcoded my own html footer into the index.php pages in the hope that this would make it load, but no dice... something stops the page downloading fully, somewhere along the way.

Since no-one else has reported this problem on osCommerce, I assume it only applies to me, except for one other person on the osCommerce forum who said he had a similar issue that only went away when he switched hosting provider. I would very much welcome any pointers as to what the cause might be. Could it be my server? My ISP? Or what? I've spoken to my hosting provider and they've agreed to recompile Apache and PHP - I'm not sure why they would do that, unless it points to a bugged version of PHP which needs updating or something. I'm hoping this will fix it once they've done it, but if it doesn't, I'm totally stuck for ideas on this. I've sent in a bug report to osCommerce but this is unlikely to lead anywhere.

Regards,

Patrick

ps: I would also add that I have a similar shop running on another server with the same hosting provider, though this one is an unsecured test site - http only. The interesting thing is that not only does this one always display the footer correctly but the Windows scrollbar goes straight to its final size, even before the product images have downloaded. So to me, in my relative ignorance, there seems to be some kind of server issue at play.

[Edouard_H]

This won't quite be expert advice, but I ran into a very similar problem where I experienced partial page rendering on both catalog category and admin pages. This occurred after a control panel "upgrade" at the site's host. Simultaneously I received the following error when accessing WebShell through the control panel:

FATAL :: WebShell required version of php 4.2.3 or above, but you have 4.1.2

When that was resolved, voila, osCommerce was back to normal. It could well have been a peripheral issue however and osCommerce allegedly supports php3/php4; hope this points you in the right direction anyway!

[Patrick Taylor]

All constructive advice welcome! Thankyou! It's looking more and more like a server-related issue rather than my own files.

Regards,

Patrick

[paladin]

Is your host using IIS or Apache to as the server software? There have been some known bugs with the IIS that can be easily resolved.

[Edouard_H]

Yes, most likely a server issue. I had installed several contributions, made modifications to the contributions, and made many other modifications. If I hadn't seen it rendering and functioning correctly first and witnessed the partial rendering in admin too, I probably would've gone crazy trying to track it down.

[Patrick Taylor]

It's running on Apache, PHP version 4.1.2. My other shop is on PHP version 4.3.2, with no problems, so I think I've tracked this down at last. Many thanks for the helpful replies.

Regards,

Patrick

[Edouard_H]

That seems to cinch it as the php version. I could never be sure that it wasn't coincidental in my case. Odd that this issue never turned up in the osc forum.

[Patrick Taylor]

I'm not terribly confident with that osc forum as a reliable means of support. The search facility seems to bring up lots of irrelevant threads, and unlike these truly excellent forums at WW, there are not so many people who seem to have the time or the inclination to resolve anything properly in response to a question. It's very hit and miss. Maybe it's just swamped with too many people screaming out for help without first taking a little time to read up and trying to fix it for themselves. Guilty of that sometimes myself!

Thanks again. Now at least I know all I have to do is wait for my hosting provider to recompile.

Regards,

Patrick

[lorax]

There is a newer version of the forum to be released. The content is a week old but the search is much better (wider net). Try it out at [oscommerce.com...]