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As far as additional functionality is concerned (as opposed to bug fixes that require code changes) there should generally NEVER be a requirement to change core code. While Brian is correct that hooks are not always readily available in the correct places, Al and the team have said from day one that they will add any new hook requested into the next core version release (see at the bottom of the following article from April 2012 (!!) - https://support.cubecart.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/203/46/how-can-i-create-a-plugin-using-the-code-hooks-system-in-cubecart-v5). We have written quite a few plugins for V5 and most required one or more new hooks to be added - the plugin was written and the hook request made and these have always been added by the team meaning the customers using those plugins can upgrade simply and easily. Writing a plugin does take more effort and time than hacking the code but in the long term it is far preferable to do it this way Thanks Ian

Hi How have you identified this as a spoof Google bot and what specific action did you take to prevent it ? Is this your own dedicated or VPS server and what support contract (managed or something else ?) do you have from your hosting company ? What protection do you have on the server - software or hardware based firewall and do you have a Web Application Firewall of any sort. Not enough information to offer much in the way of possible solutions but if you have managed support then your hosting company should be able to stop this Thanks Ian

Hi Are the server resources being maxed out related to times when you have multiple admin users logged in or are you struggling with this anyway even with one or none admin users ? You can have multiple admin users logged in and working at the same time but if you do this at times when you have lots of front end users (particularly if you are struggling with server resources anyway) and especially if your admin users are doing the same tasks (ie updating inventory) then you are likely to run into MySQL database issues. CubeCart uses MYISAM tables which dont use record level locking but instead use table level locking so on a busy server this can often cause major issues. ---------A technical explanation of how MYISAM systems operate for those interested-------------------- MyISAM tables have a read queue and a write queue. Queries are placed into one of those two queues to be processed. The write queue has higher priority than the read queue, but the table can only process one write query at a time. Multiple read queries can occur at once, so the read queue will often be empty. If a single query is added to the write queue, the read queue will block additional queries from starting. All existing read queries will continue to run until they’re finished, then any queries in the write queue will be processed. Then, and only then, the read queue will flush its queries. This queue system works very well for short queries. As long as no queries run for a significant amount of time, things will generally perform well. A long-running write query will lock the table the entire time it’s running. Additionally, a long-running read query will do the same, if a write query (even a short one) is waiting for it. ------------------End of technical explanation !-------------------- MYISAM tables perform well on systems where there are a large percentage of Reads vs Writes to the database but perform badly on overloaded systems when trying to perform multiple writes on a few tables. Thanks Ian

Are the problems to do with the developer not understanding printing related issues or are the issues with him understanding CubeCart and if so, is he a specialist CubeCart developer ? Ian

It should simply be a case of going into Admin | Currencies (there was no need to delete the unwanted currencies, you could have simply disabled them but no harm done) and looking to see what you have under Exchange Rate against GBP. If it isnt 1.0 then you need to click on the rate when you are then anle to change it Thanks Ian

I never said there was any guarantee about getting pages indexed so unsure where you get this from ! However, you obviously didnt read any of the above reply regarding the differences and the benefits or you are simply choosing to ignore them ! If you have issues with specific points then make your argument rather than making generalised negative statements It is fine for you to keep using the built in one if you wish and let people use a superior tool when they appreciate the differences and the benefits Ian

It is great that CubeCart now includes functionality to create a sitemap, as used properly it is better than not having anything but to say that it is better than external specialist software is just plain nonsense ! This is not putting down the CubeCart built in functionality in any way but some immediate and obvious differences between CubeCart's sitemap and the one we recommend (and there are plenty more reasons) The CubeCart sitemap has to be manually generated by the store owner - we have seen hundreds of sitemap files that are months or years old because the website owner forgot to regenerate it or was focusing on running their store rather than remembering to do technical stuff like this. The CubeCart version will only generate a sitemap for the store pages. If like many, you have a blog, a forum or any other software integrated with the store then these are not included. The CubeCart sitemap is purely an gzipped xml version for the store pages. If you want a nicely formatted version that can be used by your store visitors, or want one specifically for images, videos, news articles (all of which are MUCH easier indexes to get an improved ranking in) then you need specialist software. The software we recommend will also highlight any broken links which produce 404 errors, so these are easily identified and fixed. Search engines hate encountering 404 errors and will reduce crawling time. Google "should" eventually find and index everything but if you use that argument for images, then why bother having a sitemap file at all and also why bother submitting them to the major search engines. The search engines love correctly formatted sitemap files as it makes the crawlers job much easier and consequently they are likely to crawl your site more deeply and more often. The more often they visit and the more pages that are crawled on each visit, the more chance you have of getting pages indexed and certainly indexed quicker. New content that is indexed quicker than your competitors will by definition "rank" better. Who said anything about expensive and why is having a lot of additional functionality considered a gimmick ?? You by all means carry on using the built in version and it is great that it is included, but you cannot make the claims you are without a better understanding of sitemap files and the way that search engine crawlers work

Well quite obviously it isnt ! You didnt answer the question about whether you have an expert System Administrator or you have the required skills to configure Firewall, Security, Apache and MySQL none of which is done on a basic image installation when "installing" a VPS That is far too complex and lengthy a task to cover in a forum, especially one that deals with CubeCart. If you dont have the skills to do it yourself then you need to pay somebody to do this for you but then you have another problem in that you need to have enough knowledge and expertise to ask for the correct configuration Really, really and really again ?? We run a large number of servers with a strong focus on providing secure and very fast CubeCart hosting on a mix of shared hosting, reseller hosting and client dedicated servers (a couple hosting CubeCart websites with multi-million pound turnover businesses !) and host a very large number of CubeCart websites on all of these. Cheap shared hosting is less secure than from a quality hosting company but a poorly configured, or totally unconfigured VPS, as it sounds like in your case, is FAR less secure than most shared hosting. This is not the correct forum and as already said, this is far too complex a task to be covered in any forum. You will need to pay a System Administrator to do this for you. Absolutely not, there is little difference between configuring a VPS and a dedicated server - most hosting companies will provide a bare metal installation of the VPS or dedicated server along with an standard image installation of your chosen OS and you then need to configure it to your requirements.

Spiders crawling your website should always be welcomed and should certainly not cause server problems ! While it sounds like your VPS provider isnt being too helpful, their question regarding "Who is your System Administrator" indicates that you have an unmanaged VPS and they simply provide the VPS system. If this is the case and you dont have a System Administrator and you dont know how to do this yourself then you will have a serious number of issues. Have you installed and configured a firewall, have you tuned Apache and MySQL (MySQL is installed with no configuration AT ALL and will not work very well on a new VPS or Server) That sounds like a reasonable resource configuration although many fail to realise that RAM is almost always a limiting factor in VPS systems as you have to ensure you have enough not just to run your website but also the Operating System, Apache, MySQL etc etc - this will be borderline (which is why small VPS systems are NOT suitable despite what many hosting companies tell you while trying to push everyone to the latest "thing") but unless the server installation has been configured properly as I mentioned above, then memory will be very quickly fully used up and the server will slow down (as it starts swapping) and then crash. You say your site is getting busier but dont give any numbers - we have clients with VERY busy sites with large visitor numbers taking lots and lots of orders per HOUR on our E-Commerce shared hosting packages because we tune and manage the server for you and also look after server security. A VPS is rarely needed unless your site is very busy and it is an expensive option unless you have the skills to fully manage the server and system fully and store owners are generally better off spending their time, energy and money running the store ! If you are interested in one of our hosting packages, we will migrate your store over to one of our servers for you for free and as we provide full CubeCart support as part of our E-Commerce hosting packages, we will also check the store configuration as well and ensure it runs quickly Thanks Ian

Hi Ben These two issues are unrelated as you said and dont have an immediate answer for your first point but for the one above we have come across this previously with quite a few clients. It is caused when PayPal is the only payment gateway enabled and a customer hits the cancel link to return to your site. This has been fixed by the CubeCart team and will be released with 5.2.5 but if you want the fix immediately then you will need to make the following two small code changes Open modules/gateway/PayPal/gateway.class.php 1) Around line 47 find public function fixedVariables() { After this add if($GLOBALS['db']->count('CubeCart_modules', 'module_id', array('module' => 'gateway', 'status' => '1')) == 1) { $cancel_return = 'confirm'; } else { $cancel_return = 'gateway'; } 2) Around line 75 find 'cancel_return' => $GLOBALS['storeURL'].'/index.php?_a=gateway', Replace this with this line 'cancel_return' => $GLOBALS['storeURL'].'/index.php?_a='.$cancel_return, Thanks Ian

Not quite true as eregi() was not officially deprecated until php 5.3.0 although was discouraged from as far back as php 4.1 A few hosting companies are still running php 4.X (which has been unsupported for years and years and has some serious security issues) but many that were still running 5.2.X (of which there are thousands of servers) are upgrading to 5.3.X, 5.4.X or even straight to 5.5.X as while 5.2.X also reached end of life a long time ago, the main driving force is that cPanel are removing support for it from easyApache. The best solution is to upgrade to V5 as has already been said but it is relatively simple to get around these warning messages for now - eregi isnt slated for removal (which will break CubeCart V3 unless the function is replaced) until php 6.X Thanks Ian

I also think that this would be a simple to add but valuable change - any chance it could be in the next release Al ?

A CubeCart skin can be modified to create pretty much any look that you want - make sure you start with a good quality skin and then as long as you have the required skills with the Smarty template language you can achieve some great results Thanks Ian

Of course I agree that hosting companies cannot support the huge range of application software that exists out there and that is why a small but increasing number of hosting companies like us specialise and provide a level of managed hosting including support. However, the main problem here is that when the user is reporting that type of error, you wouldn't expect the response that he received - it makes no difference what application is being run !

A very good question as they obviously dont have a clue about CubeCart (which doesnt use absolute paths) or the nature of the problem - even if a path to the home directory was wrong, that would stop CubeCart from working at all, ever. You are experiencing problems connecting to the database server - cheap hosting also unfortunately often means poor support - you get what you pay for ! Thanks Ian

Hi As bsmither says, this is certainly not a normal error to be getting and indicates a problem with the hosting - the mysql server that is hosting your database is either seriously overloaded or has very poor uptime. Either way it is not a good situation before you are live with your store and is a lot more common with the big hosting companies that offer very cheap unlimited everything hosting plans (which obviously dont exist in reality but are a marketing exercise !) Consistent problems like this when you are live will result in poor Google rankings, a slow website and if your customers experience an error like that, they will not buy and are unlikely to return. Thanks Ian

Al Did you manage to get to the bottom of this and is it likely to be part of 5.2.5 ? Quite a few clients have asked for the changes to be added but are also interested to know if it will be included in the next release so changes wont have to be re-done. Thanks Ian

Hi You have at least two separate issues here : 1) As bsmither pointed out, the upgrade process had not completed (either because of error or because you didnt run it correctly) and that was causing the errors due to the database being out of sync for your version. If you ran the upgrade, this should now be fixed. 2) The bigger issue is that Hostgator have restricted access to your site due to what they deem to be excessive usage. The standard CubeCart script doesnt cause this but unfortunately they have not been helpful at all to you in identifying the cause and they have no regard for the fact that this is your business but then they dont know about CubeCart and frankly dont care ! Firstly, check that in Store Settings | Advanced tab that you have caching enabled as this will certainly help. After this it is going to be difficult, if not impossible, to diagnose the problem further because they havent provided enough information and also because they have restricted access to everyone outside a selected few IP addresses, there is no way to see what is going on. Unless they can show that one or more IP addresses were making a large number of connections to your site (which the detail they have provided doesnt show and which they should be able to stop themselves at the server level anyway) then personally I would take my business elsewhere ! Thanks Ian

Hi Al Thanks for the file and it is great news that reporting is going to be improved in the next major release ! Thanks Ian

Al Any chance of posting the patched file for this if it is a single file that doesnt cause any problems being patched by itself ? Also is it possible to request that a lot more detailed reports be added to the next or a at least a future release, such as by day for a selected month and a lot more comparative reports be added. Many stores have a huge amount of interesting data on sales stored but without extracting that and doing complicated excel spreadsheets which are beyond most users there is no way to see this. The reporting side is one area that would REALLY benefit from some serious work ! Thanks Ian

Any particular reason why you want to force SSL on every page ? Little or no benefit and makes the whole site noticeably slower which affects customer usage and also your Google rankings. As far as 3 letter searches, this is actually a restriction of standard MySQL configuration - it can be changed at a server level but can put a lot more stress on the MySQL server so unless you run on your own server (when you still need to determine whether the benefit outweighs the extra load) it is unlikely that your hosting company will make this change Thanks Ian

How about Products | Options and then in the Options Matrix section there is a Stock Level field where you can enter quantities and if you tick the Use Stock Level flag then customers cannot buy more than you have in stock of that specific combination Thanks Ian

There was a V4 mod that requested shipping country (and county / state or postcode if that affected the shipping costs) - maybe something like that could be added to core ?

Hi While I agree that a recheck of shipping is needed in certain circumstances, I also agree that this functionality quite often causes problems and frustration - it is probably the number one complaint we get from our clients as they believe that it costs a lot of sales as their customers get fed up and abandon carts. A case in point is where only a single shipping option is presented to the customer, either because store owners use a fixed fee per order or where the combination of factors limits the choice of shipping options to only one - even in this case the customer is asked to check that the shipping is correct ! Thanks Ian

Most hosting companies these days provide ionCube compiled into php as that is by far the best way of providing it and having to wait two weeks for an answer doesnt bode well the future. It is also generally considered a security risk allowing local php.ini files so I would avoid hosting companies that allow this.