Thursday, October 20, 2005
Irritated with Mambo-phpshop
Why? Because I spent 6 hours looking for a bug in it when there isn't one. The only bug is that somehow it caches output, so that even when something is changed in the backend it doesn't show in the frontend, leading me to the conclusion that something is buggy.
i.e. a product is downloadable so it doesn't need a shipping rate. However, due to selling products alongside it which *do* have shipping rates I can't disable shipping rates. Ok. So, make a shipping rate for all downloads as weight "0" and give all other products
a weight. Configure shipping rates so that weight "0" = free, and anything larger than that costs R50. Fine.
But in testing this is doesn't work. My download which used to be (wrongly) configured as a product with shipping is now assigned a weight of 0. Great. Test it through the frontend - and it still picks it up as a product which I need to pay R50 shipping on.
So I play with backend configuration etc etc etc, change shipping rates, change product weights...and nothing works. In fact, there's no consistent error either (the worst kind of bug) which means I can't re-create the error and hence track down the bug.
Before leaving work I download the database, install it locally and once I've eaten supper at home, attack it again. Same thing. This time on a local copy of mambo-phpshop. I'm beginning to hate it. Whenever I change shipping rates the change is instantaneous, but if I change product weights there's no change...and yet sometime there is.
::time passes::
Eventually I find the problem (kinda): mambo-phpshop is somehow caching *some* of the content - at least it's doing that with the product weight. So after turning on site-debug on the live site (never a good idea) and doing all of this bug tracking stuff over the last 6 hours, it turns out that I simply have to change the value and ignore the fact it doesn't show through the frontend. It'll sort itself out (or, it works if I log out and back in again).
This p*sses me off. Even though this entry will bore the hell out of you and I'd be surprised if you're still reading, but I needed to vent. [Venting done]
i.e. a product is downloadable so it doesn't need a shipping rate. However, due to selling products alongside it which *do* have shipping rates I can't disable shipping rates. Ok. So, make a shipping rate for all downloads as weight "0" and give all other products
a weight. Configure shipping rates so that weight "0" = free, and anything larger than that costs R50. Fine.
But in testing this is doesn't work. My download which used to be (wrongly) configured as a product with shipping is now assigned a weight of 0. Great. Test it through the frontend - and it still picks it up as a product which I need to pay R50 shipping on.
So I play with backend configuration etc etc etc, change shipping rates, change product weights...and nothing works. In fact, there's no consistent error either (the worst kind of bug) which means I can't re-create the error and hence track down the bug.
Before leaving work I download the database, install it locally and once I've eaten supper at home, attack it again. Same thing. This time on a local copy of mambo-phpshop. I'm beginning to hate it. Whenever I change shipping rates the change is instantaneous, but if I change product weights there's no change...and yet sometime there is.
::time passes::
Eventually I find the problem (kinda): mambo-phpshop is somehow caching *some* of the content - at least it's doing that with the product weight. So after turning on site-debug on the live site (never a good idea) and doing all of this bug tracking stuff over the last 6 hours, it turns out that I simply have to change the value and ignore the fact it doesn't show through the frontend. It'll sort itself out (or, it works if I log out and back in again).
This p*sses me off. Even though this entry will bore the hell out of you and I'd be surprised if you're still reading, but I needed to vent. [Venting done]
Technorati Tags: bad design, mambo, phpshop
