About Web Development by Activo

The Problem

This morning, we got a few calls today from clients complaining about not being able to login into the administrator panel of their shopping carts. They were all using ZenCart ecommerce. After a 45 minutes on the phone with LiquidWeb (a hosting company that excels in support) we figured out the problem: each time you login into the admin panel of ZenCart, a quick ‘Update Check’ is being done. The Update Check is using a webservice to display the latest update from the official ZenCart site. However, this morning the official ZenCart site was down which halted the login process altogether.

The Solution

After you unsuccessfully try to login, use the same browser window or tab and go to this URL: http://www.[YourDomain].com/admin/index.php and try until you manage to login. Once you are logged in, go to ‘Configuration’ > ‘My Store’ page. Click on the 8th option from the bottom, the one that says: “Show if version update available” and change it to false. Click on update and you are done. Try to logout and log back in again.

A better solution will need some coding. What we recommend is setting a timeout on the web service query to 10 seconds. The only problem with this is that it will require modifying the core files which is always a bad idea. For now, the above solution should work.

Ron Peled Web Design, ZenCart