Serendipity Removed My Entries for No Reason

[hudson-valley-dad]

I am using the "joshua_nino" template and WAS loving Serendipity. Then just now I went into the admin tool and changed the Blog description. Now when I go to the page my entries are gone (unless I click on the dates where they were inserted) and I can no longer see them in Edit Entries. Can anyone help? Also it would great if I knew WHY this happened (otherwise the insecurity of the code will make it useless to me and I will have to sadly abandon it.)
Thanks

[WonkoDSane]

So your entries are visible when you click on the calendar links, but not when you go to edit entries?

[Don Chambers]

What is the url to your site?

[hudson-valley-dad]

Sorry forgot the URL: http://damncheapwebsites.com/serendipity/

Yes they are there when I click on the dates but not on the main pages as they used to be.

[Don Chambers]

Thanks for the url. Sit tight for a bit. Hopefully, the author of that theme will offer some suggestions.

Can you temporarily try another theme and compare the results? You can always switch back to the one you are using, but a temporary switch might yield some clues. I see you are using v 1.1 - try either the "serendipity v3.0" template or "blue streak" and let us know if it made a difference.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Also, it could be that when you changed the configuration, you might have switched a setting like hte amount of entries to display on the frontpage to some odd setting?

Best regards,
Garvin

[hudson-valley-dad]

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried changing the template and it does not work with a different template. I know that I didn't change any settings but just in case, I looked and the entries are still set to show 15.
Any more ideas GREATLY appreciated.

[Don Chambers]

I just noticed something he said in the original message - he does not see his entries when on the "edit entries" in the admin panel.

I clicked on "older" in his archive plugin, and it shows 4 articles in February 2007, and 1 in Feb 2006. Clicking on either "view full" or "view topics" for the 2007 entries also shows nothing, but clicking the same for the 2006 entry works fine. Not sure what any of that means.

[hudson-valley-dad]

I just tried pushing my local copy of "index.tpl" and "index.tpl.l-r" hoping that since they were effected by my changing the description that it would roll back to working correctly but that didn't work

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Could it be that you withdrew yourself from admin usergroups? In your top right hand of the admin panel, does it say you're logged in as admin?

Entries usually only vanish if either the DB is corrupted (especially the entrycat table), or if your usergroup does not have the privilege to view all entries?

This all sounds very odd. If you'd have the chance to give me temporary FTP access, I could check it out (contact me via PM if you like to do that).

Best regards,
Garvin

[hudson-valley-dad]

Is there any chance that somehow my chmod setting got switched in my control panel? If that happened would it cause this problem?

[Don Chambers]

I cannot answer your latest chmod question, but I have a suggestion.... can you create a new entry and see if it displays? Possible more than one? Does not have to be anything other than a test entry that you will delete later. Might help answer some questions.

You might also consider taking Garvin up on his offer by giving him some kind of temporary access.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

I got the solution. Sadly I don't know the cause. This is going to be a lengthy explanation of what's going on, so please read through it all.

Serendipity can set specific read and write privileges for authorgroups, so that certain authors can only read what they have access to. By default serendipity ships with three authorgroups (Editor, Chief editor, Admin).

Users belong to usergroups. You can change group membership in the Group management panel, or you can also maintain your own group memberships in the "Personal Preferences" section. There, however, you can only withdraw from groups - you cannot simply join groups you are currently not a member of.

Now, those group memberships are important for two settings: The category section and the entry creation.

For each category, you can set which authorgroups are allowed to read a category or write to a category. By default that is set to the value "All Authors". So if you create a category "X" and assign read privileges to the Administrator group only, only he can read entries posted in that category in the frontend when he's logged in. For normal visitors, those entries will be HIDDEN. Also for members not of the group "Administrator", those postings will be HIDDEN.

You can enable or disable this permission management in the global Serendipity Configuration, the option is in "Appearance and Options" > "Apply read-permissions for categories".

Now there's a second option specific for entries that are NOT posted to categories. (i.e. where you did not select the category dropdown on the entry creation). For each entry, you can define which usergroups are allowed to read an entry. This is the same like with the category definition, but it can override settings individually. You can turn on/off this behavior via the configuration of the plugin "Extended options for entries" and then "Use group-based restrictions" as well as "Use user-based restrictions".

Now on to your specific blog: You seem to neither make use of categories (according to your database, none of the frontpage articles are assigned to any category), and you do not seem to make use of the feature to assign per-entry read access.

It might also be that you accidentaly deleted the category that all of your postings were associated to, thus leaving the permission system puzzled as to those postings that originally had reference to a group, and now no longer have.

Due to your old MySQL server version (3.23) it cannot properly handle database queries that return "NULL" values for unconfigured permissions.

So the serendipity database routine tries to tell the database "Give me all entries for the frontpage that might belong to a category; if it belongs to a category, check if the current authors has read privileges - if read privileges exist, nor no privileges are set at all, show that article". Now the last thing fails, because the old MySQL version is not able to differentiate a "NULL" value and an existing entryset.

I must admit I cannot tell you how it came to be that way, but it must have to do with category associations or usergroup memberships.

But there are some ways to fix this behaviour.

1. You could try to ask your webprovider kindly to upgrade to MySQL 4.0. MySQL 4.0 is stable since about 5 or 6 years, and MySQL 3.23 faded out of official support about 3 years ago. Just to put "your database server is old" into relation. The upside of an upgrade would also be much faster performance.

2. You can DISABLE the option to apply read/write permissions on categories on global configuration, because you don't seem to use that feature

3. You can DISABLE the options in the plugin I mentioned (IF you have it installed!), because you don't seem to use that either.

Please try that out and tell me if it works for you!

Best regards,
Garvin

[hudson-valley-dad]

Thanks!!!! I may have at one point assigned categories to the posts but then decided to get rid of the categories. Not sure why it worked so long the way it did but I guess that doesn't matter.

I changed the category reading in configuration and now it works again. Thanks!

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Phew. Glad to hear that. Finally.

Hope you'll have fun with Serendipity again. *g*

Best regards,
Garvin