My page is blank; what did I do wrong?
There are a number of causes for this particular problem. If there's no error message displayed on screen, it's most likely that the error messages are being redirected into the web server's log file. On my server, all the messages end up in /var/log/httpd-error.log. On your system, it may be something similar. Check the log files and see what's there.
If there's no obvious problem or solution in the log file, the problem of a blank page almost always lies in the templates. Here are a few things you can try:
- First, make sure that you have Smarty installed. Nothing can be displayed without Smarty. Check your log to see if you are getting "missing resource" messages from Smarty.
- Next, before you do anything else, delete the files/compile directory. This is where Smarty stores its compiled templates. Deleting this directory (and make sure to delete only files/compile, and not the files/ directory itself - that's where all your files are stored!) forces Smarty to recompile all its templates. Evidently, in some cases (perhaps when a page is aborted before completion?), the compiled templates have errors. Deleting the files/compile directory forces Smarty to start over, and this will often correct the problem. On my server, I have a cron job that deletes this directory every hour. This way, if a similar problem occurs in the middle of the night, it will correct itself.
- If you have been editing or modifying templates prior to the blank page problem appearing, then you may have caused a template error. While it's impossible to list all the potential causes of such an error, a clue might reside in the log file. If you see an error [unable to access resource ""], that usually means that Smarty can't find the requested template. This can be caused by a configuration problem (for example, the template.ini file defines "abc.tpl," but the file is actually called "abcd.tpl"). The same thing can occur if you use a bad file name in a template {include} function.
by glen
(Glen Campbell)
March 28, 2005 04:57
in Q&A
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Just posted further info here:
http://siteframe.info/p/howto_install_siteframe_5x
First, I tried to create a page (I'm logged in), and there was no folder name in the drop down so it wouldn't let me post there. So here I am cluttering up this comment box with my problem:
I am trying to install Beaumont (latest nightly, 5.0.0B2-538) at DreamHost. PHP5 is available, Smarty is available. I'm not sure about anything else. I've uploaded all the files, configured the *.ini file, and CHMODed the /files directory. When I point Firefox to setup.php, I get the error "Redirection limit for this URL exceeded...." When I point IE6 to it, it just sits there, churning away, taking forever to load, like it's in some kind of loop.
I don't know enough about PHP to be able to just look at the setup.php file (or any other file) and see that there's a problem.
Has anyone else encountered this? Will there be another nightly out to correct it?
Looking forward to trying out Beaumont (since it's down the road from me in Houston, Texas!). Thanks!
Before you try anything else, I'd remove (just rename) your .htaccess file and see if that fixes the problem. What are your settings for site_url and site_path? If removing the .htaccess file doesn't help, look in siteframe.inc; there are a couple of lines that look like this:
header('Location: setup.php');
This is redirecting to setup.php (and my guess is that it's looking in the wrong place). These may need to be changed to:
header('Location: http://example.com/path/to/setup.php');
I.e., they should have your full site_url in front of setup.php. If that fixes it, then I'll get a new build out ASAP.