This might get a little confusing as I have tried everything to make this work. All I want is a link in my brand site (domain.com) which shows the qty in my magento 1.5.1 cart (domain.com/shop) I quite easily pulled in product data and navigation blocks but no matter what I do, cart qty is always 0 from outside magento. The main way I tried was just in my brand site to go:
require_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/shop/app/Mage.php';
umask(0);
Mage::app();
Mage::getSingleton('core/session', array('name'=>'frontend'));
// trying everything
Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->getItemsCount(); // returns 0
Mage::helper('checkout/cart')->getItemsCount(); // returns 0
Mage::getSingleton('customer/session')->isLoggedIn(); // returns blank
Mage::helper('checkout/cart')->getCart()->getItemsCount(); // returns 0
Mage::helper('checkout/cart')->getCart()->getQuote()->getItemsCount(); // returns blank
Then, when none of those worked, I created a template in Magento just to give me the cart qty as a block which returns the block fine but still zero in the cart!
$block = $this->layout->createBlock('core/template');
$block->setTemplate('page/html/cartForBrand.phtml');
return $block->renderView();
and the block in magento is simply
Mage::getSingleton('core/session', array('name'=>'frontend'));
$cart = Mage::getModel('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getData()['items_qty'];
I've seen a lot of people having similar issues: / session_cookie_management, .domain.com cookie_domain(even though that's subdomain specific), I've read and tried everything I could find for 2 days. Constantly deleting session and cache directories and clearing cache and cookies with magento caching disabled.
This is the first question I've posted on this site after using it for years, I've been stuck on this for 3 days! Pulling my hair out!