My Web person needs to know

[three33]

Hey folks, I have a membership here, but the person that's installing my shopping cart does not. I have a yahoo web site and am having a new shopping cart installed.
I'll simply paste the question here that was asked of me, AND asked of Yahoo Technical support (they were unable to answer too) and hope that someone can help out.

"I need the full server path to your site, and I’m not sure Yahoo is going to give that to me…I’ve dug around your account online and (not surprisingly) it’s not listed. I’ve called Yahoo tech support and the guy there didn’t even understand my question. Without that path, the Cart won’t install.
It should look something like this: /home/youryahooID/public_html
I doubt it’s that exact line, but that’s the structure I’m looking for – a slash, then some directory names (one of which is probably your username), and possibly a final directory called public_html."

Anyone can help? Thanks sooo much if you can.

[jatar_k]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld three33

do you have ftp access at all to the site? or maybe is it listed somewhere in some kind of file manager?

can you use php on the site?

if so you could try uploading a page like so

<?php
echo $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
?>

[eelixduppy]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld three33!

I understand that there is a problem installing a shopping cart, however, I'm not exactly clear on what is going wrong with the installation. For some reason the install path isn't working correctly? Can you please elaborate a little to make it easier to understand the exact problem.

<edit>;)</edit>

[whoisgregg]

Brief aside, if my web host tech support doesn't know what I'm talking about when I ask for the absolute path to my site, I would change hosts ASAP.

That said, some digging around suggests that $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] run through on a Yahoo! hosted site will return "/" which is rather interesting. Please post back the pattern of the absolute path once you do determine it. (Of course removing any username info.)

[mcavic]

It might actually be "/", if Yahoo is using some sort of chroot environment. It would surprise me if that's even possible, but it sure would be neat for security.

But, any server-side language should be able to tell you that. In PHP, I would try

<?php
system("pwd");
?>

[SirDaver]

I have a Yahoo! site also. PHP is their server-side langauge. The path should start with a "/" and should look something like:

/userid/index.html/

I have a business merchant account with them - your account may be different. The fact that you're installing a shopping cart indicates that it is different, since all backoffice systems are provided in a merchant account.

[three33]

Yes, my account is only a basic hosting account.
I called Yahoo about 3 months ago to upgrade to a merchant account and they talked me out of it, because I'd have to basically rebuild my site and would get little benefit from the upgrade. Now, they're trying to talk me into the upgrade because they don't understand what the IT folks are asking them for.
I'm moving to another hosting company now, that understands what the IT people are talking about. I was none to thrilled to upgrade to a Yahoo Merchant Account anyway, which meant giving them yet another $20 or $30 per month in addition to a percentage of each sale.

[SirDaver]

Yea, I avoid calling them when possible. It's a crap shoot on whether you get relevant help. I built my site with Dreamweaver/php and learned as I went along. I didn't want to deal with backoffice/marketing issues so their system works great for me. At some point, when I feel like I have my sea legs under me, I'll break away from them.

Good luck!