Help - Internal 500 error when trying to checkout

[leehack]

Hi Wayne

I've just had a look for a few minutes, but it's very hard in such a short time to try and decipher someone elses work and also try to find out a problem. Your left hand navigation has a mind of its own it would seem. Have you tried to remove acatalog from the URLs at some stage? Does it pass the network test and do you have the full URL in on all fields where applicable? Are the links on the site created manually or are you using actinic to do them?

Sorry i can't really be of any help, it's extremely difficult without it in front of you on problems like this.

[bekyed]

Hi again Lee.

Have you tried to remove acatalog from the URLs at some stage?
not at all, most of the leftside navigation is out of the acatalog folder

Does it pass the network test and do you have the full URL in on all fields where applicable?

Yes

Are the links on the site created manually or are you using actinic to do them?

Manually and actinic.

Wayne.

The only thing i can suggest is to delete everything and start again from fresh
what do you reckon?

Wayne.

[leehack]

The only thing i can suggest is to delete everything and start again from fresh
what do you reckon?

I certainly wouldn't start afresh, the product info and sections is worth keeping. It looks like you could do with trying a new template or have it checked over by Teclan. I don't know what their terms of service are, do you just buy it and integrate it yourself or do they do it for you? If they do it for you, then it needs to go back to them i expect.

Take a couple of snapshots for safety and try applying a standard actinic theme, you can always import your snapshot and get back after. Try that see what happens. There is so much code to try and decipher on your pages, i'd need to sit down for half hour to try and understand it, even after that it might be completely unrelated.

If i can give you one bit of advice, get your whole site inside actinic, forget this mallarky of part in, part out, its a recipe for disaster.

As the site is completely out of use at the moment, the very last resort b4 you go to bed might be to wipe the server completely and leave it uploading overnight. This is a long shot though, i think its something fundamentally wrong with the site, its almost like its not a complete site or has things missing, maybe a corrupted upgrade. Try the latest version of actinic also - 8.5.2. Backup before you try anything.

Good luck.

[bekyed]

Hi Lee.

Thank you for your help mate.

I have had to revert back to the old site here v7 for the moment until teclan can sort this out.

www.gaynors-goodies.co.uk

This version works perfectly.

Tell me one thing.

Does version 8 change file names automatically when you upgrade?

eg:

would it change a file name from

http://www.gaynors-goodies.co.uk/aca...t_Games_8.html

to

http://www.gaynors-goodies.co.uk/aca...ult_games.html

Wayne.

[leehack]

Tell me one thing.

Does version 8 change file names automatically when you upgrade?

If something corrupts or goes titsup during upgrade, then i guess it's possible, but in general, nothing of that sort should change at all. All key SEO information remains in tact during upgrade in my experience.

EDIT: I just saw that it was 'Online Catalogue' in the URL that has been removed, i guess there is a possibility of what you have asked in that situation, although i cannot think why or how. I would still stand by the fact that it would usually be manual intervention to remove something like that.

If you do not take control of what your page names are, then all sorts can happen, probably accentuated if your site has been upgraded through the many different versions of actinic.

[bekyed]

Hi Lee.

I loaded up a page with 0nline_catalogue in their on version 8 and this works fine.

I have been doing SEO for a few years and realise that page names are important in terms of ranking etc.

This is probably the reason the catalogue fell over and would not work correctly as the filenames had been changed.

Wayne.

[leehack]

This is probably the reason the catalogue fell over and would not work correctly as the filenames had been changed.

Contact actinic then and let them know if that is the case, sounds like a bad bug which could really affect some sites and their SEO.

[bekyed]

Hi Lee,

Got this email back from Teclan, is this correct about the seo?
Hi Wayne,
>
> After upgrading the snapshot again, it is clear now that some page names were lost during the initial upgrade. I have spoken with Nicola and she recalls discussing this with you and saying that we would need to fill in the missing page names by taking the section name from Actinic, e.g. "Fleshlight Vaginas" and appending it with ".html", to become "Fleshlight_Vaginas.html". This would explain why some pages had changed.
>
> The best thing to do is to set up 301 redirects on the page names that have changed. This can be done by placing an htaccess file on your server. When Google or any other engine comes to index the site, it will first look at the htaccess file. It will see that some pages names' have changed and so it will update its records for these pages. I have confirmed this with our Search Engine Optimisation department.
>
> Any search results currently on Google will redirect to the new page name with no problem and with no impact on your result ranking.
>
> Please let me know if you have any questions.

[leehack]

Hi Wayne

I don't really want to get drawn into this any further to be honest, it's not for me to be commenting on other peoples emails. All i will say is if i have high ranking pages, i do not want them harmed so i will leave them exactly as they are. 301 redirects are fine and what you have been told is correct as far as I know. Personally i don't like them though as i am a great fan of leaving alone what isn't broken. I can never be 100% sure on what happens with 301's or the time it can take or the effect it can have.

Maybe Mal or someone else who knows Google deeper than me can comment on this part.

[bekyed]

Thanks Lee for your help anyway.

Wayne.

[dallen]

I think I know what's happened here...

In actinic V8 (and I think V7) if you don't enter a Page Name (on the Page Settings Tab) i.e. "something_for_sale.html" then Actinic will create the page name itself - it will take the Name from the General Tab, replace various characters with an _ and add .html to the end. It will also add the Name (from the General Tab) of your root catalog page (unless you tell it not to) to the beginning of it.

However - Actinic will do this on the fly - these Page Names are not created in the database and so when you do a catalog export and look at the file in excel (or any program) the fields will be blank.

So when you sent the catalog/database to Teclan these Page Names were indeed blank.

The online errors are probably caused by links that no longer exist - the Page Names have changed!

What you need to do to get all the page names back exactly as they were is to populate the Page Names for all the product pages in your catalog with (if post #19 is correct) "Online_Catalogue_" + Name (from general tab with underscores instead of spaces, forward slashes and many other characters!) + ".html". I'm not sure where the "8" is coming from in "http://www.gaynors-goodies.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Adult_Games_8.html" - you'd need to check a few more pages and see what other differences there are and find out where the "8" came from...

An easy way to do this is export the catalog, import into excel, find the column for Page Names, and update them in there with something like "=concatenate("Online_Catalogue_", the-cell-where-the-name-is, ".html")", save it then re-import it into actinic.

Make a backup first!