How To Get Good Support on the OpenCart Forum

Posted by Paul on June 6, 2019

The OpenCart 3.0 General Support Forum is a great place to get free help and support with your OpenCart issues. Experienced OpenCart developers like myself and many others will usually scan the forum topics daily to see if there are any issues we can help with. Unfortunately we're often not given enough information to be able to help.

So here are some guidelines you should follow when asking experienced professional OpenCart developers to give you their time for free:

1. Provide Your OpenCart Version

This is found in the admin area of OpenCart at the bottom and will be 4 digits like 3.2.0.2. Saying "OpenCart 3" is not helpful because developers will often know off the top of their heads if any bugs affected only a specific version and are likely to know how various parts of OpenCart are build in each version.

2. Provide Your Store URL

Especially if your problem is visible on the front-end or is CSS related, a link to the page on which the problem happens could allow us to give you a quick easy fix.

3. Provide the Name of the Theme You Use with a Link if Possible

Many front-end issues are caused by themes and sometimes even back-end issues are caused by themes that have a lot of customisation in the back-end (admin area) such as Journal. If a lesser-known theme, please provide a link to the page where you bought it.

4. Provide a List of the Extensions You Have Installed

Extensions can often cause issues so please provide a list of all OCMODs and vQmods that you have installed. If the problem goes away when disabling all extensions you can be sure it's an extension issue so re-enabling them one-by-one is a good way to find the culprit. If it's a paid extension, contacting the extension developer is usually the first step.

5. Provide Detail of Any Custom Modifications to Your Store

If a developer has worked on your store and made some modifications to the core files, 1. they are probably not a great developer because you shouldn't ever modify core files (without a very good reason) and 2. you should list what these modifications do as they may be the cause of your issue.

6. Provide Very Detailed Steps to Reproduce the Issue

Describe exactly what you were doing when the issue occurred - what page were you on? What button did you press or what action caused the error to show? Providing a screenshot or short video is often incredibly helpful. How much detail should you go in to? Enough that someone who knows nothing about your issue could easily understand and take those steps themselves to get the error to happen for them.

And that's it - provide the info above, be as clear and specific as possible, and the community will try their best to help you and give freely of their time, knowledge and experience.

If it turns out the issue really isn't suitable to be diagnosed on the forum, and that is sometimes the case because a developer needs to have a look themselves and try a few things, you can always post a Commercial Support request and pay a developer to fix, or you can always contact ourselves: info@antropy.co.uk