04 May 2015, 15:59

It looks like Mahara 15.04 uses DOMDocument::saveHTML within its WYSIWYG. As it turns out this requires at least php 5.3.6 else embedding images (which is the only thing we have tested for at the moment) does not save giving error of: "DOMDocument::saveHTML() expects exactly 0 paramete...". It is probably best to update the software requirements for 15.04 to be php 5.3.6 or above.

We are running rhel (not rhel7) and there are no official package for 5.3.6. Are there any recommendations for people who are installing 15.04 onto rhel/centos to get around this without compiling from source? Would it be best to just install php from third party repositories? If so which ones? Sources on the Internet says atom and IUS.

04 May 2015, 18:22

Hi Jawyei,

Thanks, I've filed a bug report about this issue on the Mahara bug tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1451331

Due to the limited resources of the Mahara core development team, we don't officially support Mahara on platforms other than Debian & Ubuntu. But we're always willing to make small changes to the code to accommodate other platforms. And Debian 6, which we still claim to support, only ships with PHP 5.3.3, so this issue affects us there as well. So I'll see if I can make any code changes to resolve this problem. Or if you can suggest a fix, please chime in on the bug report.

In general, I would recommend upgrading your PHP version, using a 3rd-party repository if necessary, because PHP 5.3.3 is over 5 years old now, and there have been quite a few bugs in PHP (including security bugs) patched since then. For best results I'd probably recommend upgrading to PHP 5.5, because that's what most of the Mahara devs are currently using.

I don't have any specific advice on which PHP repository to use though. Hopefully someone else on here can offer some advice on that. :)

Cheers,

Aaron