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MODX Community Forums Archive

Answered Blank white page instead of resources and chunks

    • 53066
    • 8 Posts
    pfeiffer3f Reply #1, 6 years, 9 months ago
    I have a Revo 2.3.1-pl (traditional) installation working properly since long. But since about four days my resources manager gives me a blank white page when clicking a resource or a chunk to edit. In the back end I obtain properly displayed as usual the manager start page, resource tree, templates, resource variables and snippets with all it needs. Only resources and chunks in the manager won’t show up at all, but render a white blank browser window instead. In the front end the resources appear as usual. It is not transitional nonsense, but stable behavior after various restarts etc ... I am not aware that I made any changes to settings recently.

    The last entries in the error log files are from when everything seemd OK: [2017-06-08 08:33:22] (ERROR @ /a-filename.php) Error caching lexicon topic lexicon/de/a-path-here and [2017-06-08 18:05:55] (ERROR @ /manager/a-filename.php) Error caching lexicon topic lexicon/a-path-here

    I have other websites under modx at the same provider where everything is OK. I also cleared the various caches and set compress_css and compress_js to 0 (they were 1 before, and it worked). I restored the MODX database from a backup-one-week-before-failure of my provider. All the above did not change my white-screen-problem. It remained the same

    Any idea what this might be? Thank you for your time on this.

    Best regards

    Axel

    This question has been answered by pfeiffer3f. See the first response.

      • 17301
      • 932 Posts
      LK Reply #2, 6 years, 9 months ago
      Check your core/config paths and make sure all the paths do acutally exist and everything has the correct permissions settings.
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        • 53066
        • 8 Posts
        pfeiffer3f Reply #3, 6 years, 9 months ago
        Hi LK:
        thank you for your response. I checked the core/config paths and they seem OK to me. Six of them including base path are defined, and they correspond to my installation.
        From the following question you can infer that I am not really an expert on this all: What do you mean with permissions? Is it some kind of user permissions (for what?) or s.th. else?
        And if this all does not help: Could a MODX upgrade help? Or simply delete MODXl, reinstall it into the old database or import the site content into a new database (~~> how to do this?)?
        Thanks for your time on this.
        Regards
        Axel
          • 3749
          • 24,544 Posts
          BobRay Reply #4, 6 years, 9 months ago
          When a working site stops working, here are some more things to try (in order, one at a time):

          1. Check all the extras in Package Management to see if any need upgrading.
          2. Manually delete all files in the core/cache directory.
          3. Repair all tables in the database in cPanel's PhpMyAdmin.
          4. Visit the site with your browser in Private or Incognito mode.
          5. Disable all plugins (right-click on them in the Elements tree), then clear the cache files again.

          If 1, 2, and 3 don't fix it and 4 does, it's a problem with a leftover cookie or something in your browser cache.
          If #5 solves it, there's a plugin that doesn't work with the current version of PHP. Bring them back one at a time to see which one it is.

          If all of that fails, it could be a problem with mod_security, which your host would have to fix, though that usually only affects specific chunks or resources.

          Another possibility is that an upgrade to PHP makes one of your older extras, or some MODX code crash. There may be updates to extras that you're not seeing because they require a more recent version of MODX. Version 2.3.1 was released in July of 2014, so it's quite old.

          I don't usually recommend upgrading a broken site, but if none of the above works, I'd get the UpgradeMODX extra and upgrade to 2.3.0, then 2.4.0, then 2.5.0, then the current version. It's important not to skip over the 0 versions. Even if you get things fixed, you should definitely upgrade the site because there have been several important security fixes since your version.


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          • discuss.answer
            • 53066
            • 8 Posts
            pfeiffer3f Reply #5, 6 years, 9 months ago
            Bob:

            I owe you gratitude for two reasons:

            1. My site runs again. To make a long story short: It was the TinyMCE plugin. After deactivating, it, the “white page” problem disappeared, I had the known MODX display, but without content entries of the resources in the respective fields (template variables). After completely deleting TinyMCE I also saw my contents again in the backend. Reinstalling TinyMCE led to the same problems, redeleting solved it again. Then I updated MODX, and now also TinyMCE runs again.

            2. Before posting my questions I considered updating MODX and went to https://docs.modx.com/revolution/2.x/administering-your-site/upgrading-modx. I must say that I find this page confusing. It is a page of the class “those who need it don’t understand it and those who understand it don’t need it”. It does not really say what I have to do. Insofar your hint to upgradeMODX was helpful. Why don’t they mention it in their upgrade section?

            But one remark on updateMODX and your hint: You mentioned not to skip the ...0 versions. But the plugin does not offer ..0 versions, only 2.5.2, 2.5.4, 2.5.5, 2.5.6, 2.5.7. Since there were no ...0 versions recognizable for me, I jumped right on 2.5.7, and this ruined everything by the apparently well-known “liune 1881” error, front end and back end 100% dead. So I had to restore my server (files and database) from the backups my provider keeps. Doing it then stepwise > 2.5.2 > 2.5.4 > 2.5.5 > 2.5.6 > 2.5.7 worked out fine. Maybe I could have skipped some of them, don’t know.

            For updating some other sites I followed your indications on the line 1881 error at https://bobsguides.com/blog.html/2016/06/27/missing-db-fields-(unknown-column)/. Updating then went without problems.

            Thanks again and best regards

            Axel
              • 3749
              • 24,544 Posts
              BobRay Reply #6, 6 years, 9 months ago
              Thanks for the kind words. By .0 versions I meant 2.4.0, and 2.5.0. Sorry if that wasn't clear. You would probably have to have changed the &versionsToShow property of UpgradeMODX and manually deleted the core/cache files to see them. You may still hit a missing DB field error at some point, but you obviously know how to solve that.

              I'm glad you got it sorted. smiley
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                MODX info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/modx.html
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