Product/Orders/PaypalGateway/Shipping problems

[Sonya]

Yikes, then I'm currently stuck with a shopping cart that doesn't work.

I've read a couple of times on these forums where it's been mentioned that perhaps developers are too quick to release updates.  I have to agree in this instance. 

Yesterday I had working shopping cart.  Today I have a very unhappy client and no sign of a resolution.

OFF: Sorry, but if you not so experienced, WHY do you upgrade modules on the production site whithout checking them on the test environment first?

[lemonaid]

It was suggested that it might resolve another problem I was having.

I know better now.  Thanks.

Luckily the site isn't live, but I was hoping that it would be by Monday.

[Sonya]

Today I have a very unhappy client and no sign of a resolution.

Luckily the site isn't live,

Have you made a backup of your system before module upgrading? If so, you can just roll back to solve all your new issues and start to correct old issues.

[kendo451]

I made the same mistake of upgrading on a live site without testing first last month, which created big problems and ruined my reputation with a client.  But that was my responsibility to test before making changes to production site.

You also should save all of your templates and global content blocks in a folder on your PC, so if anything happens to your site you can replace them easily.

If you have saved the templates & GCB's, it is not more than 2 hours work to reinstall a site from scratch, install all the modules, created the pages and put the templates back in.

Sorry it's a hard lesson to learn.

Whenever I do an ecommerce site now, I create the subdomain test.thesitename.com and create a duplicate of the website there so I can test everything on the same server as the production site.  This is important because my development server is XAMPP on windows, but the production sites are usually hosted on Linux with openbasedir and other unique configurations.

That said, the new releases of Orders and CMSMS have not been playing well together since August.  Change to the URL system in the core caused problems with Orders.

It might be a good idea if there are release candidates for the Ecommerce modules so that people can tell the difference between a stable release and what is essentially a beta release.

Keep in mind that this is free open source software.  It would be great if it was perfect, but it is a work in progress.  Calguy is doing a great job of moving the ecommerce modules toward a powerful system that will allow us website developers to create flexible ecommerce sites.  But I think we are maybe a year away from having a system that is truly well tested and reliable.