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Troubleshooting tips

We need your assistance to make the documentation accurate, user friendly and understandable. Therefore we welcome any tips or suggestions regarding documentation. Thank you in advance for your contribution.

However, we will not respond to technical support questions submitted using this form. If you are having difficulty with CMSMS and cannot find the solution on this website, please submit your question appropriately on our support forum at: http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org. Please remember to follow the forum rules when posting.


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From time to time when building CMSMS websites, writing code, or using a third party module or plugin you may experience strange behavior requiring you to do some troubleshooting. Below are some tips and techniques that you can use to assist you:

System Problems

Smarty Problems

Functionality / Layout Problems


Error Logs

If you are receiving a "error 500" message, a blank white page, or a hanging system (fails to complete downloading), among other problems you may find hints to your issue in the error logs. Error messages typically describe the error (in technical terms) and provide the file name and line number in the program code where this error occurs.

All web servers are capable of producing error messages for a number of problems. You can often diagnose simple problems by finding these message, then looking up what they mean. Often web hosts will make access logs and error logs available to you via ftp or by your webhosts admin panel. If you are having difficulty finding them, please ask your host.

Additionally, CMSMS attempts to trap some errors in its admin log. You may have success looking under "System Admin » Admin Log" in the CMSMS admin console.


Enable debug mode

When searching for the cause of a problem you can enable debug mode in CMSMS to show error messages that may be hidden.

Add to (or change in) the config.php file:

  1. $config['debug'] = true;

When you are ready simply add a hash (#) before this line or set it to 'false'.

  1. #$config['debug'] = true;
  1. $config['debug'] = false;

If a symptom to the problem you are trying to troubleshoot is that you see the headers to the tabs of a CMSMS admin page, but none of the intended content searching for the words "Error", "Notice" or "Warning" in the HTML source of the page may be useful.


PHP Information

To display the PHP Information of the server, simply create a new UDT named phpinfo and with the content:

  1. phpinfo();

Put the tag {phpinfo} in a page, and in the frontend it will show your server information.


System Information

In the CMSMS admin panel you will find a summary of the most critical server settings. You will find it at
Site Admin >> System Information

In the top right corner of the System Information page you will find a link "View Text Report".
Clicking on it will display a page suitable for copying into forum posts.


Get template variables

If you want to know what smarty variables are available in a template, place the following tag to your template (summary, detail, page or any other template) and you will get variable list on you screen:

  1. {get_template_vars}

print_r

To get a variable dump of a smarty object or variable, do something like this:

  1. {$var|print_r}
  2. {$item|print_r}
  3. {$entry|print_r}

Pretty URLS

If diagnosing problems with the submission of forms, or with redirection it may be useful to temporarily disable pretty urls in the config.php

  1. #$config['url_rewriting'] = 'mod_rewrite';

and/or temporarily remove any .htaccess file.

  1. mv .htaccess htaccess.notused

Validate

If experiencing problems with layout, particularly cross browser issues, or form submission problems before reporting an issue in the CMSMS forum ensure that your HTML code validates (or that all reported validation errors are expected and understood. For example, the facebook fb:like plugin may not validate.). See The W3C Markup Validation Service


Javascript

If experiencing problems with layout, form submission, slideshows, or other custom behavior it is important to understand any and all javascript errors. All browsers have the ability to display an error console of some sort. In Chrome the javascript console can be accessed by pressing Ctrl+Shift+J


FireFox Add-ons

A number of essential tools for any webdeveloper:

  • Firebug
    Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page...
  • Web Developer Toolbar
    The Web Developer extension adds various web developer tools to a browser.
  • YSlow
    YSlow analyzes web pages and why they're slow based on Yahoo!'s rules for high performance web sites.