Yanmania... Website troubleshooter
Mon, 30 January, 2012 - 9:59:07
In the last week I have run into problems with two otherwise stable websites. What was the source of these problems? People of course!
The first problem was with this site, It was a sneaky one that must have appeared sometime since my last post on Jan 17th. I didn't notice it until I tried to upload a new image to the art page. I found that I just couldn't publish. I knew the site had been working correctly. I checked the form fields, checked the templates, cleared my cache and tried different browsers. Then, when I tried modifying a template, I found I couldn't do that either. At this point I wondered if my expression engine installation had corrupted somehow and considered updating the version of EE that I was using. However, it turns out that the free version of EE that I use is no longer available and that I would have to upgrade to a freelancer license. I considered this for a while and am in fact still considering it despite having fixed the issue. The free version I am using does not entitle me to support and does not allow me to use the current features. Though I don't have support, I was still able to google my way to another user's post on the EE forums. He had the same issue as me and, it turned out, the same solution. My hosting company had tightened up the security on their servers, preventing malicious scripts from running. This had the adverse effect of preventing the submission scripts within EE from running as well. I contacted them and they were able to add an exception there and then and I was able to continue posting my images.
The second issue was with a MODx website I created for a colleague. In his case he had created a second site hosted on the same webspace. He had moved the files for the site into a sub-directory and this of course broke everything! The front end was missing all of the text and images, which are loaded from the CMS, leaving only the theme. Once I connected to the FTP I could see that he hadn't moved the associated MODx files and folders, so I moved those into the new subdirectory. That fixed some of the images as the relative file paths were now correct but the content still wasn't appearing. Also the back end wasn't accessible. I knew there must be a further issue with file paths but I didn't know where to look. Once again google saved the day. Searching for my problem I found a guide to moving a MODx site to a sub-directory. I went through the steps, updating the config files and performing a reinstall to be safe and the site was aback up and running. My colleague was very happy (and so was I).
