2 series Mastercards and your Zen Cart

You may have already heard that Mastercard is rolling out cards that start with a “2” instead of the traditional “5.”  You’ll want to check your version of Zen Cart to be sure you can handle this.  Versions 1.5.5b and above have built in logic for the native payment methods (such as Authorize.net); if you are running a lower version, you will need to merge in the changes from the latest copy of includes/classes/cc_validation.php.  If you are using an extension to manage credit card payments, be sure to test with Mastercard 2223000048400011.  Then you can have confidence that your cart properly processes “2” series Mastercard cards.

Upgrading Better Together for OpenCart 2.3.0.2

Better Together is a BOGO discounting module I created for Zen Cart.  I have ported the logic to a few other carts (osCommerce, Prestashop, and OpenCart), and this post pertains to the OpenCart port.

The first release of the Better Together for OpenCart module was for OpenCart 1.5.  Then I made a handful of tweaks for compatibility with version 2.0.  Now I knew I had to upgrade for 2.3 compatibility, but since the version 2 changes were pretty easy, I honestly thought upgrading for version 2.3.0.2 of OpenCart would be trivial.  I was wrong!  There were a few tricky things, and I’ll share them here in case other software developers are working on upgrading their pre-2.3 extensions.

  1. The file paths are different.  All file paths now include “extension” directories.  So instead of catalog/model/total/better_together.php, the file path becomes catalog/model/extension/total/better_together.php.
  2. The inheritance hierarchy is different.  So instead of declaring your model class as ModelYourClass, it’s ModelExtensionYourClass, which extends Model.
  3. This is what really tripped me up.  Because the 2.3 base class overrides getters and setters, you have to be sure to declare all your class variables so that magic methods won’t be used to access them(*).  If you came out of PHP4, this is a bit of an adjustment, but there you are.  The positive thing is that it makes your code more self-documenting.

(*) If you don’t do this, you’ll get the “Indirect modification of overloaded property has no effect” fatal error.