Michael_onSaba

Hi. Thanks for the response. I ended up purchasing the Simple Cart Customer Input Addon that you recommended to a poster in another thread. It gives me more direct control over the information I need my customers to provide. So thanks for that as well.

In response to your questions. I phoned Paypal and the tech I spoke to could not immediately identify where the problem was occurring. He said scripts sending shopping cart info to paypal usually supersede the settings in Paypal acct. That the paypal settings, like “include special instructions to merchant field” would be more of a backup in that situation, but the settings in my wp shopping cart script would most likely override the paypal settings for purchases made via the script. However, both paypal and the Shopping cart were set to include that field. WP Simple Shopping cart doesn’t actually have an on/off toggle for including the special instructions field. But it does have a setting for customizing the text for that field. And I had that set with custom text.

Since both the script and paypal were set to include the field, but it was not showing, he offered the suggestion that perhaps some conflict was occurring between the script and paypal. I tried trouble shooting by changing the settings in question, but to no avail. He also suggested creating a “buy now” paypal button, leaving the description info blank, and using that button code to replace the “Checkout with Paypal” button the script uses on my site. I could not find any settings in the shopping cart plugin to customize the checkout button, other than using a custom image. So that didn’t pan out for me either.

I had made no recent changes to my site in regards to the shopping cart or shop pages or widgets. But WP, the WP Simple Shopping Cart plugin, and Paypal all have had updates in the past year. My only guess is one of those updates or changes introduced some conflict causing this feature to stop working for my shopping cart.

But it is resolved now using the add-on.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Oddly, the problem solved itself. Shortly after submitting the OP, I tried one more thing. Having deleted all recently uploaded plugins, I tried installing yet another plugin, just randomly selected, and I was able to activate it and still access my plugins.php page. No errors, no blank page. So I tried installing to two plugins that I had previously had problems with. Both installed, still no problems. I’m still baffled. Don’t know if it was just some temporary server issue, or a corruption/permissions issue, but after two to three hours of not being able to install any plugins without this issue popping up, everything went back to normal.