Article Pages not rendering

[dendle]

Hi There,

I have installed the OJS system for a client using the recommended requirements (php ver, mysql ver etc). The client has added an example journal and its articles to the system. However when you select to view the abstract or PDF of an article I get a blank page being returned (well the 2 pages of the frameset).

If I hit refresh a few times I might be lucky to get the main content page or the nav or both appear.

If I clear the cache/t_compile directory it will work for a little while (one or 2 refreshes) then it stops working again.

Any thoughts greatly apprieciated as my client is keen to show the system to clients.....

Also php memory_limit is set to 31Meg, the code is vanilla from install and the permissions to the directory seem fine. On that note can someone tell me what the file permissions in the t_compile directory should be....

Thanks,
Anthony

[asmecher]

Hi Anthony,

Try setting the display_errors option in php.ini to E_ALL and restarting your web server; if you're on a shared server, you can usually accomplish the same thing by adding an ini_set('display_errors', E_ALL); call to the top of OJS's index.php file. This will cause any error messages to be displayed to the screen.

As you've guessed, this sort of situation is generally caused by file permissions. Use chown -R and chmod -R (the -R is for recursive) to give write permissions to /path/to/ojs/cache and every subdirectory and file in it. The web server user (i.e. www-data) needs to be able to create, read, write, and delete all contents of cache and its subdirectories.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Open Journal Systems Team

[dendle]

Hi Alec,

Regretably your solution did not solve the problem. I should also note that the problem is intermitant. Sometimes it works perfectly, other times only a single frame loads and worse nothing loads.

Any thoughts?
Anthony

[asmecher]

Hi Anthony,

Hmm... Are you running an outdated version of PHP? I've seen one or two distributions that periodically cause segmentation faults, although these are generally logged in the Apache log.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Open Journal Systems Team

[dendle]

Hi Alec,

We are currently running PHP 4.3.10....This install is running under a cluster of Solaris Machines running the SunOne server.

-=Anthony=-

[asmecher]

Hi Anthony,

Unfortunately, I don't have much to suggest -- if pages are intermittently working, I suspect that there is a problem with the platform (i.e. PHP/Apache/etc). Check to make sure that error messages are being displayed (i.e. display_startup_errors and startup_errors) and that the Apache log isn't reporting any strange PHP behavior; if you're able, upgrade to a newer PHP. OJS has been heavily tested and deployed on the PHP 4.x line, so I don't think it's an OJS compatibility issue.

If you're able to narrow down the problem, please report back here.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Open Journal Systems Team

[dendle]

Hi Alec,

Long time no post for me. My team and I have been looking into the rendering error. We ended up running up an install of Open Journal on a Windows based server with XAAMP. This has solved the articles/pdf files not rendering (we concluded that there is a conflict somewhere with the SunOne 6.1 Web Server running under Solaris).

We have also found and fixed a bug in the Mail.inc.php file. In the else if statement it is missing a reference to (Core ::is Windows()). This corrects a bug in this file when it is executed in a Windows environment. Full Code as follows (change hightlighted in bold):

/**
* Return a string containing the from address.
* @param $encode boolean encode the data (e.g., when sending)
* @return string
*/
function getFromString($encode = true) {
$from = $this->getFrom();
if ($from == null) {
return null;
} else if (Core::isWindows()) {
return $from['email'];
} else {
return ($encode ? String::encode_mime_header($from['name']) : $from['name']) . ' <'.$from['email'].'>';
}
}

Let me know what you think......Glad to be getting to be getting solutions to our implementation issues..

Cheers,
Anthony

[asmecher]

Hi Anthony,

I believe this is a PHP bug that's been corrected in recent releases; your fix works, but the same problem may crop up elsewhere. I'd suggest using SMTP (as configured in config.inc.php) to solve this problem.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Open Journal Systems Team