New installation woes

dave_stewart

I've got a few things which don't really appear to be working straight off the bat, so I'll just list them here, rather than clogging up the forum with posts for everything:

#1 - What is the config setting to tell Vanilla what the root folder is?

At the moment, if I delete a conversation, Vanilla redirects to vanilla/discussions.

Unfortunately, my Vanilla install is at forum/ so it breaks.

I looked at the docs, honest Guv, but the page was missing: http://vanillaforums.org/docs/configuration-initialconfiguration?Title=Initial+Configuration

#2 - My Category List is only displaying the total number of discussions, but is not displaying the number of discussions per Category, as I've seen on other Vanilla forums. Is something not working as it should?

Cheers,
Dave

UnderDog

@Tim @Todd maybe new bug to squeeze in for 2.0.18.x

Todd

Please report bugs in the github issue tracker. Seriously. It really helps us to prioritize things and assign them to team members.

https://github.com/vanillaforums/Garden/issues

dave_stewart

I'm happy to report these items as bugs - if they are bugs.

Are issues 1 or 2 easy to solve in the meantime?

Todd

1. The code is written to figure out what folder you are in. You may have a problem with htaccess, I'm not sure, but look for that file and there is a bit of help in the comments of that file to support some webhosts that have strange htaccess rules.

2. I think what you are asking about is a theme issue, but it may be an import issue. Are you saying it's only showing one count of discussions or what?

UnderDog

@dave_stewart what's the URL of your site? (if you're ready to show us)
@Todd I know, but I don't know if it's a bug yet. As soon as bugs are definately bugs I'll be happy to report them in the proper place.
As long as we don't know whether it's a bug or not, what should we do then? (time for a split / discussion)

dave_stewart

Weirdly, my htacess was blank, so I downloaded it again.

This is how it looks now, but it still redirects to /vanilla

# Modified
# If you modify this file then change the above line to: # Modified

   RewriteEngine On
   # Certain hosts may require the following line.
   # If vanilla is in a subfolder then you need to specify it after the /. 
   # (ex. You put Vanilla in /forum so change the next line to: RewriteBase /forum)
   RewriteBase /forum
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php\?p=$1 [QSA,L]

dave_stewart

Here's a link to the forum, so you can see the category list not working: http://www.xjsfl.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussions

dave_stewart

Also - are pretty URLs not enabled by default? Is there (again) a configuration option for this?

Tim

It tries to detect if URL rewriting will work for your system during install. If you didn't copy your .htaccess, it obviously wouldn't have worked.

$Configuration['Garden']['RewriteUrls'] = TRUE;

Should already be in your config, but set to FALSE. Change it to TRUE.

dave_stewart

Excellent, that worked great.

I find that new installations, and new users especially, are great for finding cases when things don't work as expected.

A few other things I've found during getting my own forum up and running have been:

1 - Bonk page, due to wrong password configuration in config
2 - HeadModule not found error, due to local cache-files replacing server cache files

Might I suggest an improvement for Vanilla with regards to local and server differences?

1 - If the cache files were instead stored in a subfolder per server configuration, this would stop weird caching errors where for example local files overwrote server files.

2 - If a further set of (optional) config files were stored per server configuration, these could be edited, then loaded last (if found) to overwrite a few select config settings, such as database usernames and passwords, file locations, etc.

/vanilla
	/cache
		/www.xjsfl.com
			controller_map.ini
			etc...

		/www.xjsfl.local
			controller_map.ini
			etc...

	/conf
		config-defaults.php
		config.php
		constants.php
		locale.php

		/www.xjsfl.com
			config.php
			etc...

		/www.xjsfl.local
			config.php
			etc...

Cheers,
Dave

dave_stewart

By the way - clearing the cache folder appeared to sort out the issue with the number of discussions not displaying. Although I don't know Vanilla well enough to say for sure - it might be coincidental.

dave_stewart

Well, I thought this this was a case of editing the bootsrap file, but after I had a few problems with the Twitter sign-in plugin, I revisited the issue and realised that I could add a couple of files, as the bootstrap runs a bootstrap.before.php and a bootstrap.after.php file.

So I wanted to load an additional config file per server, so I added a new folder in conf/ called server/ then two files named after the $_SERVER['hostname'] for my local and remote configurations:

/conf
	/server
		www.xjsfl.com.php
		www.xjsfl.local.php

In each of the files I added the server-specific database login details.

Then, I added the file conf/bootstrap.after.php, and in it, the following code:

$Gdn_Config = Gdn::Factory(Gdn::AliasConfig);
$Gdn_Config->Load(PATH_CONF.DS.'server'.DS.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'.php', 'Use');

For caching, I added a subfolders in cache/ for each of my server locations:

/cache
	/www.xjsfl.com
	/www.xjsfl.local

Then, I added the file conf/bootstrap.before.php, and in it, the following code:

if(!defined('PATH_CACHE')) define('PATH_CACHE', PATH_ROOT.DS.'cache'.DS.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);

It's all running pretty well now, and no issues with data being overwritten between locations.