Has anyone experienced an involuntary boot out of the system while entering or editing product info? This seems to happen randomly with me. I'll work on a series of product and then, all of a sudden, the system returns a login prompt and looses my last entry. Then it seems to do that continuiously after the first occurance. The login prompt can appear in the main window or in a popup window, like the "upload image" or "select file" popups. I've always assumed it's a browser timeout, and I've tried clearing the cache, deleting temp cookies & files, even rebooting. Finally I give up, yet when I get back to ViArt several hours later, it seems okay again. I think I'm going nuts. Is anybody out there having the same issues???

I experience it occasionally. My sister experiences it frequently. She's tried on three computers with multiple browsers, with the same bad luck.

ViArt support says it may be due to a faulty "session lifetime parameter" on my server, and advised to change or add this line to my "php.ini" file:
 
session.cookie_lifetime (0 - default value) session.gc_maxlifetime (1440 - default value)
 
Now my problem is - I don't have a php.ini file! Not sure how that happened, or if I should panic, but it's not there. I've asked them if I can recreate it.

Just create the (text) file with Notepad and upload to your root.

Thanks, I will do that. I'm wondering if other parameters should be included other than that one line. I saw you posted your PHP.INI on the forum but I don't want to copy parameters specific to your installation.
 
Do you know if ViArt supplies a "standard" PHP.INI file with the original installation, or are they all created, post install, to deal with specific issues?
 
If they do furnish a standard file - does anyone have a copy they can post here?

Follow up: Still having issues and now it's compounded by GoDaddy shared hosting! GoDaddy claims if I want a PHP.INI file, I must create and upload it to my root. When I did so with only the lines ViArt supplied, my site threw "Zend not installed" errors. I had to delete the file to get it working again.
 
So now I'm assuming there is some level of default control on my shared PHP hosted site, but I'm not sure if GoDaddy will acknowledge that. I've Googled around to see this is a issue with others in need of php.ini files on GoDaddy sites.
 
So the question is: is there a way to create the php.ini file to only "append" the session timeout commands I need without overriding the other server controls?
 
If I do use Chris' php.ini, or manage to create my own "generic" version with commands to turn on Zend and other features required to run ViArt, and it doesn't work --- Can that action do any lasting harm to my site? Will I simply be able to delete it to get back to normal?
 
It is a live site and my client would not be happy if my tinkering crashes it.

Hello Dean,
 
I can recommend you to try special php function to override some basic parameters - ini_set.
 
Just open your includes/common.php and add somewhere at the top after <?php tag the following lines:
 
ini_set('session.cookie_lifetime', 0);
ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', 1440);
 
Hope it helps.
 
Thanks,
Monk

Thanks for the tip. ViArt stepped in and fixed the condition, but I will make a note of this technique in case other PHP functions require tweaking.