Restoring a beekeeping store's front end and card payments

The challenge

An Australian web and design agency looks after the online store of a beekeeping supplies retailer, built on OpenCart 3 with the Journal3 theme. Over a few months the store hit three separate problems, each serious for a business that sells online.

First, the storefront stopped loading: visitors saw a page that kept spinning and never displayed. Shortly after, the image manager in the admin stopped working, so staff could not upload or manage product photos. Later in the year, the Square card payment option disappeared from checkout, leaving customers without a way to pay by credit or debit card. The agency needed each issue diagnosed and fixed without putting the live store at further risk.

What we did

• Front-end outage. We traced the blank storefront to changes made through OpenCart's theme editor, where the header and home templates had been overridden by a third party. Resetting those overrides to the default code brought the site back the day after we started.
• Image manager repair. We found that a single oversized product image was breaking the admin file manager. Removing it restored normal image uploads.
• Square payments. Rather than experiment on the live store, we set up a mirror copy, installed an upgraded version of the Square payment extension that is compatible with the Journal theme, and tested checkout there. Once it worked, we made it live and sent the agency the old files as a backup.
• Clear explanations. For each fix we explained the cause to the agency so it could brief its client and avoid a repeat.

Tech stack

PHP 7.2, OpenCart 3.0.3.2, Journal3, Twig, cPanel, Square payment extension