Hi,

I just updated my cart to version 6.8.1 and I'm having a few wired issues:

1 - I'm getting a questions mark with a diamond shape around it wherever I have a space in my product descriptions. Items that were entered manually looks fine however the items that were uploaded via csv are displaying funky. See example here:
https://www.eleganthomeaccents.com/proddetail.php?prod=797001

2 - I'm also seeing the a question mark with a diamond shape around it where there should be a right arrow on the Category navigation. Please see the left navigation under 'Our Products'/Category when viewing the product detail page.

3 - When I enlarge the image in the smaller screen it's too big. The extra large image needs to be smaller for a mobile device.

4 - When I Add an item to the cart, the interface doesn't look good.

I've uploaded the css folder and the PHP on the server was updated. All of the above issues did not exist prior to the update. What am I missing here?

Thanks,




Marcia Henry

Hi Marcia

You need to make sure you have this in the HEAD section of all your pages, not just the cart page

<link href="css-cart/ectcart.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

and that you have uploaded ectcart.css from the updater to overwrite the old one.

Your store pages show

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

and

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

so you don't want to have that duplication. View source in your admin to see what is being used there as it needs to match with the what you have on the frontend.

Andy

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Thanks for the feedback.

I was able to fix the css issue #4 with the cart.

Issues # 2 and 3 - I updated my pages to use charset=iso-8859-1 but this did not fix the problem. So, I looked at my SQL database and noticed that it's using utf-8: MySQL connection collation: utf8_unicode_chi. I checked the list of available charset but didn't see iso-8859-1 as an option. Would you suggest that I contact my host to update my charset?


Marcia Henry

Ideally you would use utf-8 on the front-end, backend and database but you would then need to check the pages as you may then have to enter some characters again.

Andy

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Hi Andy,

I changed all my pages to use charset iso-8 and my database is also using iso-8 so these two are in sync. This did not resolve the issue. Next, I uploaded a clean csv file with a small subset of my products and this did not fix the issue. To me, the issue seems to be with ecommercetemplates because in the Admin, the Category dropdown, I see the same strange character at the beginning of each category name/label. If I click to Modify a product and hit the back button, somehow the issue in the Category dropdown is 'fixed' but if I refresh the page the Category dropdown goes back to the weird characters. This page by the way is using iso-8859-1 which didn't pose this issue before the update.

Any other insights that I might try would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Marcia Henry

Can you add this to includes.php

$adminencoding="utf-8";

so the admin also uses utf-8

Andy

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I added the line but it didn't fix the admin page. Admin page still says charset=iso-8859-1.

Marcia Henry

If you are using 2 vsadmin folders for security reasons, can you check both includes.php have that line in them and that it's not duplicated?

Andy

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Andy,

Both vsadmin folders are now in sync. The issue still not resolved. The Admin page is the only page that is displaying charset=iso-8859-1. I even ran the store update a few times again. Is there another option to try?

Marcia Henry

I viewed source on your site and can see the contents of the includes file appearing there - that obviously shouldn't be happening. It's showing just after the closing </head> tag so I assume that's related to why the includes.php changes aren't happening for you. Can you check that?

Andy

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At some time in the past I placed the lines of code after the end head tag and now I don't recall why. These lines are all added just after the closing head tag and before the opening body tag:

<?php include "vsadmin/db_conn_open.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/languagefile.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/metainfo.php" ?>
<?php $nobuyorcheckout=true; ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/includes.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/incfunctions.php" ?>

When I removed all of the above code, the page doesn't render. I added all back except the includes.php line and the page rendered (home page, product, product detail pages updated so far).

This may be totally wrong and messing up my functionality. Before I continue to update all the pages, please let me know what to do with the above lines of code.


Marcia Henry

Something really funky is going on here and I'm about to pull my hair out . . . the includes.php is also showing up in the ECT Admin when I view source???

I took a look at my other store that has not been updated - www.lighting-at-eha.com. It's using charset=iso-8859-1 on all the pages and my database is utf-8. It has the includes files after the closing head tags however the code is not rendering in the view source. The site is functioning well.

What to do next??



Marcia Henry

Hi Marcia, if you are seeing code its could be a syntax error in the vsamin/includes or a missing closing tag in the vsadmin/includes.

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I checked my includes.php file. The only change I made to the file after the update was to add the line $adminencoding="utf-8"; In any case, I checked and everything looks good.

The error message from the view source on the ECT admin page is this:

Current window: www.eleganthomeaccents.com/vsadmin/adminprods.phpHTTP404: NOT FOUND - The server has not found anything matching the requested URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).(XHR)GET - https://www.eleganthomeaccents.com/vsadmin/ectadmincustom.css

The ectadmincustom.css is not in my vsadmin folder. Is this a missing file here?

Marcia Henry

1 - I went through all my store files and cleaned up as much as I could find and added charset=utf-8 on all pages but none of this fix the funky ? characters.

2 - There is also an error in the ECT admin page regarding this file not found: /vsadmin/ectadmincustom.css - this is still not fixed because I don't have this file.

3 - When I view page source of the ECT admin page, the includes.php script is still showing up in there

4 - I also have another issue now...My pages are all displaying the Discount text. I removed the discount in the Admin however it won't go away from the website

5 - I also ran the updater several times

I'll give this one more day before I roll back to my previous version because I just don't know where else to look to solve these issues.




Marcia Henry

Can you send me an email with your FTP and control panel details and I'll see what's going on?

Andy

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Thanks Andy. I sent you an email with the info.

Marcia Henry

I have fixed all the product descriptions via the csv utility - can you check that are all showing correctly now?

Andy

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Andy,

Thank you so very much for saving me from going bald. The product descriptions all look great now. Was it something I did or missed during the store update? Please let me know so I can avoid this happening when I update my other store.

I'm also going to get the CSS Premium Layout to add more structure to the products and category pages.

Thanks,




Marcia Henry

Hi Marcia

I don't think it's anything you did and to start with I couldn't find the problem so in the end I opened your csv file in Notepad++ and went to encoding > utf without BOM and that removed any errant characters on saving.

Andy

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Andy,

Whatever you did fixed the issue. I just updated the includes files and my prod and category files because they were not updated with the CSS. Sad to say, but my store Admin is back to showing the funky ? between the category levels. The includes script is also showing up in the source again. The pages on the site are still good...although all the scripts are rendering in the view source.

Do you think I need to rebuild this site with clean files?

Marcia Henry