ProStores update bug fix: The case of a broken product scroll.

Recently one of our clients, Rico Perez, which offers affordable supplements and vitamins sent over a ticket mentioning his product scroll was broken. A quick look confirmed, and we were off to the races to fix it. A quick look revealed a “minor” ProStores update had been executed, which disturbed the product scroll. Ah, the joys of hosted eCommerce solutions.

The site uses a custom prostores template which we developed that includes pages for both English and Spanish. While they had the same issues, -- no featured product and the product scroll stopped at “n.” The featured product item was fixed with a new line of coder, but the product scroll remained broken. There were minor differences, which led us to believe it was a paging issue.

One of our developers dug in, not finding any reason in the template or code why the scroll was broken. The suggested solution was to rebuild the scroll from scratch. Right before we began the 4-6 project I took a closer look at the admin panel and found a revised option in the ProStores admin – “Show 30 products on one page,” which was the maximum value. We went ahead and omitted the paging from the template and everything was fixed.

While it was a simple fix, we figured we should share because it is a sure thing someone else is stuck on this and we hate seeing 5 minute fixes turn into large projects.

Lessons learned here include:

• Before starting a new project or bug fix make sure to take one last high-level look.
• Custom work on hosted solutions can be at the mercy of unannounced updates – be careful out there.
• The solution is probably right in front of you J

Please use the comment section below for any additional ProStores info or questions or to share what lessons you have learned by experience.