Two Drifters

Problem: you are adding a new block type to your package. You are updating the package using Concrete's update functionality, but no new block type shows up.

Solution: remove the package completely (uninstall – but leave it in the package directory, when C5 offers to move it to trash!), and install it again. Your block type should show up now.

The symptoms:

Your site is suddenly down. If in production mode, a blank & empty page is displayed.

The solution:

After checking that the MySQL daemon still works, Apache is running, PHP is working and the configuration has not been changed (a test.txt file is served correctly), you might want to look into your PHP error log.

Here's how you add PHP error logging to your .htaccess, if you do not have it already:

# php error logs..
php_flag display_errors off
php_flag log_errors on
php_value track_errors on
php_value error_log /path/to/php.error.log

Be sure to chown the file to www-data:www-data or whatever your PHP process is running under.

In my case, the culprit was a very strange "duplicate entry" error:

[09-Jun-2010 20:18:49] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'ADODB_Exception' with message 'mysql error: [1062: Duplicate entry '300969' for key 1] in EXECUTE("insert into PageStatistics (cID, uID, date) values ('1', 0, NOW())")
' in /…/concrete5.4.0.5/concrete/libraries/3rdparty/adodb/adodb-exceptions.inc.php:78
Stack trace:
#0 /…/updates/concrete5.4.0.5/concrete/libraries/3rdparty/adodb/adodb.inc.php(1037): adodb_throw('mysql', 'EXECUTE', 1062, 'Duplicate entry…', 'insert into Pag…', false, Object(ADODB_mysql))
#1 /…/concrete5.4.0.5/concrete/libraries/3rdparty/adodb/adodb.inc.php(993): ADOConnection->_Execute('insert into Pag…')
#2 /…/updates/concrete5.4.0.5/concrete/libraries/3rdparty/adodb/adodb.inc.php(761): ADOConnection->Execute('insert into Pag…', Array)
#3 [internal function]: ADOConnection->Query('insert into Pag…', Array)
#4 /…/updates/concrete5.4.0.5/conc in /…/updates/concrete5.4.0.5/concrete/libraries/3rdparty/adodb/adodb-exceptions.inc.php on line 78

After checking the appropriate table (used for logging visits to your C5 page), I could not understand the error – there was no entry for key 300969, the last entry was 300968.

Here's a quick way to turn off page statistics, which will fix this error and bring your site back on: Put this line o'code in your config/site.php

define('STATISTICS_TRACK_PAGE_VIEWS', false);

In PHPMyAdmin there's the option to manually increase the auto_increment value. I increased it by one to 300970 and the site was working again, with statistics (comment the line you just inserted.)

There's a couple of pages out there, currently having this problem (searching with Google helps). I'm offering a low-cost watchdog service for Concrete5 sites – be back up again before your visitors notice!

If a page name contains "/" (the slash), the Concrete5 edit bar does not appear on the page. (At least in Opera 10)

Solution: go to the Dashboard, edit the page name (hint: remove the slash) from the Sitemap there and visit the page again.

After Georg (below) commented, I felt inspired to polish the code into usable Alpha state.

IdeaDay PDF Generator (v3.0 Alpha)

This Concrete 5 package encapsulates mpdf and makes it easy to create PDF versions of your pages.
It was written by ideaday.de
Contact: http://www.ideaday.de/kontakt

mpdf was written by Ian Back (it makes itself heavy use of other OSS projects).
We use Version Version 4.4, released 24/03/10

See the other files for Licensing and Version information. (This blog entry is just a formatted README.txt)

Download

Get your package here:

• Download the newest version from my download page

Installation

1) download the ZIP
2) unzip it
3) upload the folder ideaday_pdf_generator in your packages folder
4) install it using the Dashboard

Usage

Add an Icon / link to the page(s) you want to generate the PDF from, including the query parameter ?ipg_mode=pdf
i.e. http://www.example.com/this/is/a/page/?ipg_mode=pdf

Feel free to edit the default settings in /helpers/pdf.php:
$options['ipg_filename'] = 'website.pdf';
$options['ipg_mode'] = 'I';
$options['ipg_header'] = ";//'{PAGENO}'; //You could set up your own header here.
$options['ipg_footer'] = ";

To modify the way the PDF is shown (streamed / forced download) you currently have to edit the line
$pdf->showPDF();
and change it to the appropriate function.

Functions

public function getHTML()
Returns the actual HTML used to build the PDF.

public function getPDF()
Returns the PDF as a string.

public function streamPDF()
Streams the PDF.

public function showPDF()
Displays the PDF in the browser

Known limitations

• Floating images are rendered on top of the text instead floating beside it. If you specifically set the image size in pixels (IMG width / height), it will render correctly.
• I have exposed only a very limited subset of the MPDF package, i.e. it renders in DIN A4, instead of letter, etc.
• You have to add the icon/link, and tweak the source to change settings. I plan to add a block which will display a link and allow you to set up settings on each page individually.

Starting with the newest version of Concrete, 5.4, updates have been integrated into the web interface.

For me, this update process suddenly did not work anymore correctly:
After running the upgrade script, it would still show that we were using the old version of the code and offer to upgrade again – as if nothing had happened inbetween.

The solution to this problem lies in your config/site.php – look at the very end of it, it will contain a statement similar to this one:

<?php define('DIRNAME_APP_UPDATED', 'concrete5.4.0.5');?>

My config/site.php contained two statements – one having the previous version, one the newest version of the update.

Try removing them both and running the upgrade once again. It will work this time – no upgrade will be offered again.

My experiments with a sufficiently complex page (www.vitanit.com) have shown: no. There even may be a slight time penalty.

To enable it, you'll have to download it, compile it, and add the following to your php.ini:

extension=adodb.so

How do you know that it's installed? phpinfo() will show something like:

ADOdbInfo Extension requires ADOdb classes
Download http://php.weblogs.com/adodb
API Version 5.04

It might be useful for the IdeaDay Import Wizard – which relies heavily on the database.

If you use Form Helpers and add a file upload there's a gotcha, which can drive you insane if you don't know about it:

The form encoding type has to be set to multipart, like this:

<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="<?php echo $this->action('submit')?>">

If you don't do this, your file will never turn up, and you will be debugging like mad and not understanding where the problem is :-)