After installation, weird-looking front, admin pages

[chasman]

Hi,
I just installed Serendipity using a PostgreSQL database. It doesn't give me any errors about being unable to access the DB, but it's giving me an obviously problematic front page. Please see:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~chasman/journal/serendipity
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~chasman/journ ... pity_admin

Additionally, it doesn't recognize the admin username/password combination I set up during installation. Might this be a problem with database access? How can I determine whether or not it's actually interacting with my database properly?

Lastly, I might as well ask this while I'm here - I'd like my blog to be accessible from http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~chasman/journal. Should I have installed serendipity in -that- directory rather than journal/serendipity?

Thank you so much in advance! (When you respond, please keep in mind that I'm a newbie wrt PHP.)

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

This more looks like some vital files of s9y cannot be found. Can you please re-upload all s9y release files to your web, and check your FTP client for any possible errors?

As for the username/password, it could be related to that problem. If not, can you check the serendipity_authors table to see if your login exists there? Did you use special characters for the password? The installer often uses ISO- charset, and later the installation uses UTF8. If you use special chars outside the ASCII-scope, it can happen that your checksum mismatches...

Lastly, I might as well ask this while I'm here - I'd like my blog to be accessible from http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~chasman/journal. Should I have installed serendipity in -that- directory rather than journal/serendipity?

Yes, that would be the preferred way. In that case I suggest to drop the whole installation in /serendipity and reinstall from scratch. Also delete all the serendipity_* tables, and when you choose a password, make sure you only use ASCI letters.

HTH,
Garvin

[chasman]

Thank you very much for your response!

I've tried re-loading everything a few times now. I'm not using a special FTP client; just downloading the file from your site through Mozilla Firefox, and un-tarring it. Do you have any ideas about what files might be missing?

It doesn't seem to be creating -any- tables in my database. When the installation summary says "checking to see if database and tables already exist", is it really just checking to make sure the database doesn't have serendipity_ tables?

(Re: password - I'm using plain letters right now.)

Thank you so much; let me know if any other information might help you make sense of this.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

I've tried re-loading everything a few times now. I'm not using a special FTP client; just downloading the file from your site through Mozilla Firefox, and un-tarring it. Do you have any ideas about what files might be missing?

Hm, if you did it like that, an upload error should not be the cause. Let's see what's happening on the DB side. DId you check your postgreSQL error log? Maybe that gives a clue. Which version are you using?

It doesn't seem to be creating -any- tables in my database. When the installation summary says "checking to see if database and tables already exist", is it really just checking to make sure the database doesn't have serendipity_ tables?

Yes, at that place s9y checks if a serendipity_authors DB table exists. So if you install s9y into a database that has no tables in it, the installer should definitely create tables!

HTH,
Garvin

[chasman]

Hi, Garvin,
Turns out I just messed up the permissions on the database. (How embarrassing!)
Thanks so much for your help!

[chasman]

Well, maybe I spoke too soon...
I have Serendipity up and running - mostly. I'm seeing two problems:

(Again, my blog should be located at
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~chasman/journal)

#1: When I click the title of an entry, it brings me to an unhelpful empty page rather than (as I would have expected) the isolated entry.

#2: When I try to edit an entry, rather than bringing up the existing text of an entry, it sets me up to create a -new- entry. Could this be a database permission problem?

This is the command I used to grant permission prior to installation:
GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO "www-user";

For what it's worth, this is the result of \z when I check out the database. It looks suspicious to me that nothing appears in the "access privileges" column.

Schema | Name | Type | Access privileges
--------+-------------------------------------+----------+--------------------------
public | serendipity_access | table |
public | serendipity_authorgroups | table |
public | serendipity_authors | table |
public | serendipity_authors_authorid_seq | sequence |
public | serendipity_category | table |
public | serendipity_category_categoryid_seq | sequence |
public | serendipity_comments | table |
public | serendipity_comments_id_seq | sequence |
public | serendipity_config | table |
public | serendipity_entries | table |
public | serendipity_entries_id_seq | sequence |
public | serendipity_entrycat | table |
public | serendipity_entryproperties | table |
public | serendipity_exits | table |
public | serendipity_groupconfig | table |
public | serendipity_groups | table |
public | serendipity_groups_id_seq | sequence |
public | serendipity_images | table |
public | serendipity_images_id_seq | sequence |
public | serendipity_mediaproperties | table |
public | serendipity_options | table |
public | serendipity_permalinks | table |
public | serendipity_plugincategories | table |
public | serendipity_pluginlist | table |
public | serendipity_plugins | table |
public | serendipity_references | table |
public | serendipity_references_id_seq | sequence |
public | serendipity_referrers | table |
public | serendipity_suppress | table |

I would appreciate any insight you might have...! Thank you!

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Sadly I don't know postgresql enough to tell you if there might be permission problems. Are there any postgresql logfiles you could check?

But it definitely seems to happen that s9y cannot properly access the database, because the URL of a single entry should definitely show entries. It seems that the serendipity database function to fetch a single entry is failing (because the same query is used for displaying an entry as well as editing it).

If you want to get your hands dirty and cannot find anything in the pgsql log, check the include/functions_entries.inc.php PHP file and search for "function &serendipity_fetchEntry".

At the end of the function, just before this line:

Code: Select all

$ret =& serendipity_db_query($querystring, true, 'assoc');

you add a line:

Code: Select all

die($querystring);

and then you load your blog Entry URL, there you should see the full SQL query. You can use this to copy+paste into pgsql commandline (running with your s9y user DB account) and see if the query fails somehow?

HTH,
Garvin