CubeCart: Offline mode doesn’t allow me to see the store as admin

Working on a webshop for a client using the free eCommerce program CubeCart, I ran into an issue when enabling Maintenance Mode for the webshop: while I was logged in as an administrator, I was not able to view the storefront anymore of the CubeCart online shop.

My client – also logged in as an admin under different credentials – was able to see the storefront with my custom offline message displaying at the top.

Since I am the one who needs to maintain the store, it is essential for me to be able to see the storefront while on maintenance mode while logged in as an admin.

I tried logging in using a different browser and logging in on my phone, it neither of this resolved my issue.

Luckily, I was able to solve this problem and I’ll happily share with you what was going on:

Mismatched session IDs

I checked the cookies to see whether the session IDs for myself being logged in as admin were the same. And they turned out to be mismatched.

Example of what my session IDs looked like:
cbt83nmdu81tkle6fpa0iv4p1e <-store front
59di37d3mq7sktidjam89k9ktp < dashboard
p9v6efbe3ughn4q99smclcrvq9 < dashboard
cbt83nmdu81tkle6fpa0iv4p1e <-store front
f3fv2b9rqanqol2556mtmm6d5l < dashboard
edrqmb116qtoktb3865fr2iutv < dashboard
cbt83nmdu81tkle6fpa0iv4p1e <- store front

As you can see above, the storefront and admin IDs were differently, which shows that they were apparently running different instances.

Solution

I solved the issue by closing the tabs and manually relogging in via the admin URL of CubeCart: http://website.com/admin_DIX54M.php

What caused the issue? I have no idea. But for me, this solved it. So if you’re also running into the problem of not being able to see the CubeCart storefront while in maintenance mode, perhaps this will help you!

Note: I’m using CubeCart version 6.5.1.

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