13 January 2014, 6:39

My apologies for reposting a question that is likely to have been addressed before, but I'm guessing that I'm not phrasing my search properly.  I have a new install on Mahara that I set up yesterday, and can access the admin dashboard but I cannot seem to access the user dasboard.  My assumption is that when you navigate "home" (in my case: mcrompton.ca/mahara) that you should get, at minimum, a login screen, and if already logged in a user's dashboard.  Maybe my assumption is wrong. 

I have installed the latest version 1.8.1 on a linux machine running the appropriate versions of php and mysql.  The only known issue is that my host has the php open_basedir restriction enabled.  I'm hoping that this isn't the cause of the issue I'm having. 

Can anyone point me in the direction of an answer?

Thank You,

Marc

13 January 2014, 13:25

Correct, if you go to the "/" page of your site, normally Apache will rewrite that to "/index.php", and that will show you your site's Welcome page, with any custom text you may have entered for that page, and a login box in a column off to the side. Take a look at http://demo.mahara.org for an example.

What I see when I try to go to http://mcrompton.ca/mahara/ is a plain white screen. This means that the PHP page crashed while it was trying to load, and your site is not set to print errors to the screen. Instead, they'll typically be printed into your PHP error logs, so check there for a more detailed message about what went wrong.

The specific location of the PHP error logs depends on your OS, web server, and config. For example, in Ubuntu PHP error logs get printed to Apache's error log, which by default is at /var/log/apache2/error.log

As for open_basedir... it probably won't cause problems as long as your $cfg->dataroot directory is under one of the directories listed in your open_basedir setting.

Cheers,

Aaron

13 January 2014, 15:06

Thanks for responding Aaron:

I've been with this host for almost a year, but have only today, found the php error log today!  A number of items are logged when I refresh the index page, but only one line is marked as an error.  It reads:

PHP Fatal error: Cannot redeclare plural_en_utf8() (previously declared in /var/www/vhosts/mcrompton.ca/httpdocs/mahara/lang/en.utf8/langconfig.php:42) in /var/www/vhosts/mcrompton.ca/httpdocs/mahara/lang/en.utf8/langconfig.php on line 44

Does that make any sense to you?

13 January 2014, 17:30

Oh no, the dreaded "Cannot redeclare plural_en_utf8()"! That's an error message people have been reporting for a couple of years now, which we've been unable to replicate or determine the exact cause of. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1239451

Try this, it's the most robust workaround that has been suggested so far:

1. Open up the file htdocs/lib/mahara.php in a text editor

2. Locate the declaration of the function "get_string_from_file()". This will be a line that reads "function get_string_from_file($identifier, $langfile) {". If you're using Mahara 1.8.1, this will be line 763

3. Six lines below that one (line 769 in Mahara 1.8.1), you'll see a line that reads "include ($langfile);". Change the "include" to "include_once" so that the line reads "include_once($langfile);"

If that works for you, then I may just upstream it into Mahara core even though I haven't identified the precise cause of this error yet.

Cheers,

Aaron

14 January 2014, 15:33

Thanks, Aaron:

That edit fixed the issue.  While I've got you, can I ask about the cron file?  It seems that I have to manually run it from time to time.  Is that normal?

Marc

14 January 2014, 19:37

Hi Marc,

You're actually supposed to set your server up to run the cron file once per minute. There are some instructions on our wiki about how to do this on a standard Linux system: https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Cron_Job

It sounds like you may be using a shared hosting setup, in which case look in the controls that your host provider has given you and you'll probably see something for setting up cron jobs.

Cheers,

Aaron