Random String - solution found

One of my customer’s sites blew a fuse this week, and I’d like to share the solution with you all, in case you have a similar problem.

Some of the Product Category pages weren’t listing any products and the Product pages themselves were outputting a load of strings like:

M 0 0 o 9 3 H 7 p Q 0 9 L 8 X 1 t 4 9 c H Y 0 1 Z 5 j 4 T T 9 1 f G f r

(PS. I’m not able to paste the code in here without the spaces, as it just gets displayed a “1”. Weird!)

I tried upgrading EE from 2.8.1 to 2.9.3 and upgrading all the Plugins to the latest versions, but it made no difference.

I’m using the Segments of the URL to drive the content of the site pages, by using the Plugins below in the following way:

{exp:category_id category_group="1" category_url_title="{segment_4}" parse="inward"}
 {exp:child_categories parent="{category_id}" child_categories_sort_direction="asc" show_empty="yes"}

https://devot-ee.com/add-ons/category-id https://devot-ee.com/add-ons/child-categories

I discovered that there was another Entry (from a different channel) that had the same URL Title as one of the problem Products. By changing the URL Title of that Entry, the Product page loaded correctly again. So, I decided to add a channel=”products” variable to the code, like this, to force it look at only the Products Entries:

{exp:category_id category_group="1" category_url_title="{segment_4}" parse="inward"}
 {exp:child_categories parent="{category_id}" child_categories_sort_direction="asc" show_empty="yes" channel="products"}

Secondly, I found that by adding a dynamic=”no” variable when outputting Products to the Product Category pages, all the missing Products appeared again:

{exp:channel:entries channel="products" category="{embed:category_id}" dynamic="no"}