Can’t login to your Zencart admin? Here is the solution

Today we installed a new Zencart for our client at obtainingmoksha.com and we ran into a very annoying problem: we keeps getting redirected back to the admin login page without any error at all. Thinking it’s the usual cache error of Zencart, I cleared out the browser’s cache. That didn’t help. At this point, we suspect it might be a session error, so we use the Fix cache key module which save us many times before. The cache path is now updated but we still can’t login @[email protected]

At the same time, on the front page we also had this error (with Zencart debug turned on)

Fatal error: Call to a member function add_current_page() on a non-object in /path…./autoload_func.php on line 90

Fearing that we may have some corrupted files during the upload, we reuploaded every single file. Still no joy!

At this point, we think it might have something to do with the server’s session handling. A quick search for the fatal error above returned several interesting pages where people ran into the same problem. Lucky enough, we found THE SOLUTION for our case here. In short:

1. session.auto_start is enabled (in the server’s config)
2. One solution is to contact your host to have this turned off. However, if you are on Linux server, you can try to fix this yourself by
   1. Use a FTP client, go to your store’s root folder and see if a file named .htaccess is there (please note some FTP clients hide this file by default, check the manual of your FTP client).
   2. If the file is there, edit it; if not then create it. Inside this file please put:
      php_value session.auto_start 0

Hope this tip helps you!