Disappaearing/Reappearing checkout items in IE and Chrome

Can you give me your url for the site with the problem? I almost exclusively use chrome and don’t have the problem on my site, so I’m guessing it is some other plugin or web server configuration that causing the caching on your site. Also, go to iguanaworks.net and see if you can reproduce the problem — if you can then that will make it much easier for me to fix (and tell me how to reproduce).

Can you try disabling all other WP plugins and seeing if the problem goes away — it is probably the most like difference between our sites and if it the problem, then you can start adding plugins back in and find out which plugins is causing the conflict.

Sure, the URL is: https://himalayastudios.com/figures/

I think it must be some kind of cache issue, but even when I completely delete all cache in both IE8 and Chrome, the issue is extremely stubborn and persists. I have even tried to add the following code to the header.php file of my WordPress theme to force a refresh on every page load (as suggested elsewhere):

<?php
header(‘Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT’);
header(‘Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate’);
header(‘Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0’, FALSE);
header(‘Pragma: no-cache’);
?>

…to no avail. I have disabled every Worpress plug-in I have installed, including “WP Super Cache”. It doesn’t seem to make any difference at all to the shopping cart’s behaviour.

Strangely enough, I couldn’t reproduce any of these problems on the iguanaworks.net site with Chrome or IE8. Everything worked fine there.

On my site, click on “D’arc Polyresin figure” on the far right “Products” menu. Add one of each option (Fire, Earth, Air, Water) by clicking the “add to cart” button. Next click on the “Bort Polyresin Figure” on the right side under the “Products” menu and add it to the cart. Somewhere along the way, certain figures won’t get added, depending on whether you’re using Chrome or IE8. Sometimes you’ll need to click “Add to cart” twice to get the item to show up. Then if I click “View Shopping Cart” up the top, it takes me to the checkout page, but it says there are no items in the cart (in both IE8 and Chrome). Any ideas?

Thanks!

I see the problem on your site. If you have disabled all the WP plugins, then only thing left (that I can think of) is the web server. Maybe it has some aggressive service-side caching enabled. What server are you using? Do you know how it and php is configured?

I’m using Hostgator for the server. Just got off their livechat and the tech support guy seems to think it’s not a server side caching issue. He insisted that the server doesn’t do any caching.

He said this about the server/php configuration:

“You’d have to be more specific, but the server is Apache/php/mysql.

“5.2 by default with 5.3 via https://support.hostgator.com/articles/hosting-guide/hardware-software/php-5-3 is the version.”

I should also mention that this glitch occurs, even if I change WP themes. I’ve tried with several different themes and it happens every time. So I’m guessing it’s not something unique to my current theme’s code either.

Well, I’m stumped if it isn’t a server-side issue. If anyone has an ideas, please post here and maybe we can figure this out. Only thing I can think of to try is a PITA, but to put the site up with a different host and see if that fixes it. Also, maybe ask hostgator about php sessions as that is how the cart to saved / stored.

The guy at the Hostgator tech support spent some time looking into this.

He discovered that if you add the [scabn name=”Darc Polyresin Figure” price=”12.00″ fshipping=”5.00″ weight=”2″ options_name=”Type” options=”Fire Mage, Water Mage, Earth Mage, Air mage” qty_field = “true” b_title=”Add To Cart”] code via the “Text” editor at the top right of a Page (rather than via the visual editor) and then click the Update button, that seems make the cart work correctly on Chrome and IE8 for some reason.

After making these changes, if I test the cart and add all the items to it, and then go to the checkout, everything works fine. However, it doesn’t stay this way for long. After adding the items, if I click the “Home” button it shows an empty cart again – and then clicking to add more items to the cart will revert to the previous glitchy behaviour.

I also added code to the .htaccess file in an attempt to force the entire site not to cache any pages, but it still happens.

I’m not sure how relevant any of this is, but just thought I’d post the findings, just in case.

Actually, after experimenting some more, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the code is added via the Visual or Text editor.

What happens is that WordPress will only load the page fresh from the server if it detects that said page has been updated since the last time the visitor viewed it.

WordPress is extremely stubborn about this and refuses to adhere to even the .htaccess file telling it to refresh. So the problem seems to be that when you click to revisit a previous page, it will display the cached version of that page from *before* you added the item on that page to your cart. The big issue is that the “shopping cart” sidebar widget only updates if the actual page has been updated since the last visit. This results in an erratic-looking cart when clicking between pages, as items get added added and removed during normal site navigation.

By the way, this doesn’t seem unique to this shopping cart. I also tried it with “WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart” and the same issues occurred.

Okay, sorry about the triple posting, but I believe I’ve finally solved this issue in both Chrome and IE8. Here’s what I did:

1) I had to edit the wp-config.php file in the site directory. In the line near the top that says define(‘WP_CACHE’, true);, I changed ‘true’ to ‘false’.

2) I completely deleted every file, folder, and sub-foler in the /wp-content/cache directory on my server.

3) I deleted all cache, cookies, and temp files from my browser histories.

After following the above steps and testing the site in both Chrome and IE8 for a while (following the patterns that normally cause the glitch to occur), I think I can safely say that the problem is now gone!

Hopefully this solution will be helpful to anyone else who runs into this issue.

Interesting. Glad you found a fix. For what it is worth, my WP site has the config option WP_CACHE enabled. So disabling caching isn’t *always* required. I wounder if Hostgator or maybe WP multi-host enables more aggressive caching than what I have. For t he record, I use nginx and php-cgi on debian.