Fantastico De Luxe 2.10.4 r43  contains this note: – Zen Cart: 1.3.9d -> 1.3.9g. So now the problems really begin. Fantastico skipped e and f and went for g, unfortunately.

This means that cart owners can use Fantastico to upgrade their Zen Cart sites without knowing a thing.  I’ve always loved the ease of cart ownership that cPanel’s Fantastico provides but this release is going to create problems for those unknowing cart owners.

First, the new release requires changing the name/path of admin. If you don’t, you get blocked from admin.  But it’s not a simple change.  Not only do you need to change the name – easy enough to do through cPanel’s file manager- but you also must change the configuration file to match. I’ll add the instructions at the end of this post for those who need it.

Secondly, Zen Cart owners will find the new code may create a variety of problems if they have utilized a number of features that make Zen Cart as much a content management system as a e-commerce shopping cart.

Those Features Are:

Define Pages – a way of changing content on certain pages, most prominently the front (main) page.

Banner Manager, EZ-pages and certain mods.

What Will Happen

The problems only show up if one makes changes in admin to those features. The problems manifest as html code being treated as text – therefore showing the source code instead of the formatting, the links, the images and so on.

Since no one is going to be aware of the potential problems, the fix is what is going to be necessary once the cart owner realizes there are problems.  And it’s not going to be easy to find the information.  No one wants to announce these problems (understandably) but that can leave the average, non-technical cart owner in the dark. The forum thread is located here. The fix for the define pages, banner manager, ezpages, etc, is described in my blog post here.

Don’t let this deter anyone from using Zen Cart!

Since I work on Zen Cart for a living, I know that you will think me prejudiced when I say that Zen Cart is the best free, readily-available e-commerce alternative out there.  The truth is that I was a cart owner and after some time on OsCommerce went looking for a better solution.  My choice was Zen Cart and that turned into my job as well as my personal cart choice.

So don’t avoid Zen Cart and don’t leave it. Stick with it and these problems will be fixed. The Zen Cart Team is a dedicated group and is one of the chief reasons I chose Zen Cart. Their support is incredible for an open source project.

Not only that but all these changes were a proactive attempt to tighten the cart security as these features are all potentially vulnerable avenues into Zen Cart. It was a well-meant attempt, but we are now awaiting the release of the next version with bated breath.

The Admin Instructions

Simply change the admin name to something else in cPanel’s File Manager or while logged in via FTP.

Then edit the admin/includes/configure.php file.  This file on some servers has its file permissions set to 444, preventing changes to the file or uploading a new file.  Change the permission to 644 and make the changes or delete the file and upload the replacement.  You may need to change the permission back to 444. Just check your front page and see if there’s message there about the configuration file.  No message?  Just leave it at 644.

Change every instance of “admin” to your new admin name in that file.  There are 3 of them on lines 42, 43 and 61 or somewhere close to those numbers. If you are on the most recent cPanel, you can use the edit function in file manager to make those changes. Be very careful to not touch anything else – the forward slashes, for example, are necessary.

Try accessing your admin again. If you get the zen cart install screen instead of the login screen then you did something wrong in that configure file.

Don’t want to do it yourself?  Just contact me.