blank pages when not logged in to manager

hi all,

i’m new to modx, have inherited a site that used to work until recently and now shows the following symptom:
when logged in to manager the site shows fine an another tab or window of the same browser; when logged off the site shows all white pages - no output at all;
i have been reading a couple of other posts related to "white page" or "blank page", all suggestions there did not help;
modx in my case is set up on a

windows 2k server with
apache 2.2.8,
php 5.2.8,
mysql 5.0.26 and
MODx Revolution 2.0.6-pl2 (traditional) (just updated from 2.0.2 as this was suggested to solve my problem, but it didn’t); firefox 3.6.13 and
ie7;

i tried to track down the problem in php and found out that in modresource.class.php line 64
if ($baseElement= $this->getOne(’Template’)) {
evaluates to true when i’m logged in to manager, but false when i am not;

no output to core/cache/logs/error.log, no relevant errors in phps error log file;
any suggestions?

please be patient with me concerning modx and its principles, i’m completely new to it;

your help is greatly appreciated!

This may be a silly question, especially if you’ve already read some stuff on blank pages, so pardon me if this is worthless, but:

Have you PUBLISHED the resources(pages) that you are referring to?

If you are logged in as admin, you can see all resources, even when they aren’t "published" for public viewing.

If the resources appear in the Tree to be grey (rather than a dark, strong black color), Right click on the Resource, and click "Publish Resource"

hi minaris, thank you for the really quick reply;

my resources seem to be published, they are (all but one) black and have a menu item in their popup menu saying "unpublish resource" wich makes me believe they where published sometime (i haven’t done it as i inherited the project recently);
when i select "view resource" i get an overview that has no published date set on the general tab; on the changes tab it says "published on 09/28/10 14:51.26";
i tried unpublishing a resource and publishing it again using the popup menu entries of the resource itself; the page calling that resource is still blank;
any further suggestions?

Quote from: ypl at Jan 17, 2011, 04:53 AM

hi minaris, thank you for the really quick reply;

my resources seem to be published, they are (all but one) black and have a menu item in their popup menu saying "unpublish resource" wich makes me believe they where published sometime (i haven’t done it as i inherited the project recently);
when i select "view resource" i get an overview that has no published date set on the general tab; on the changes tab it says "published on 09/28/10 14:51.26";
i tried unpublishing a resource and publishing it again using the popup menu entries of the resource itself; the page calling that resource is still blank;
any further suggestions?

Keep in mind I am relatively new to MODx myself, so as happy as I am to offer suggestion, I’m far from what would be considered a "pro". I’ve been using it for about 5-6 months now.


My best suggestion would be to try creating a completely new resource, put some random text in it, select your template, check the "Publish" check-box, save it, and try to view it from another PC or after you’ve logged off. Perhaps since you inherited the job/layout from someone else, they may have put more advanced code in it?

By "inherit" do you mean you got access to a manager at the .com, or someone gave you their files and you uploaded them to a new server? Possibly a permission issue.

Quote from: Minaris at Jan 17, 2011, 12:23 PM

My best suggestion would be to try creating a completely new resource, put some random text in it, select your template, check the "Publish" check-box, save it, and try to view it from another PC or after you’ve logged off. Perhaps since you inherited the job/layout from someone else, they may have put more advanced code in it?

By "inherit" do you mean you got access to a manager at the .com, or someone gave you their files and you uploaded them to a new server? Possibly a permission issue.

i will try your suggestion to create a new resource; what i try to avoid is to re-create the whole site, so in the end i have to find out what the problem is with the existing resources; but creating a new resource might help finding the problem;

by inherit i mean that i got the responsibility to get things going; neither files nor database have changed location; the person who created the site has no idea what the problem might be and is busy and far away; but the whole thing worked some weeks ago (i saw it myself before i even new the username and password), and all of a sudden alle pages are blank when not logged in...

Are there any permissions set up for the documents or contexts?

Are you the admin Super User, or not?

This is a total guess, but maybe for some reason the general public does not have permission to access the web context of the site? Check the Access Permissions for the web context (system->contexts->right-click web->update context) and make sure the user group (anonymous) has Load Only access. If that’s not it, I would go through the security settings - access controls, resource groups etc and see if you can find any setting that looks like it’s limiting public access to the resources.

I’m not sure why this would have changed, but it seems like something related to security and permissions would create the symptoms you describe.

@BobRay:
Quote from: BobRay at Jan 18, 2011, 01:38 PM

Are there any permissions set up for the documents or contexts?

access permissions for context "web" look like attached screenshot;
no access permissions set for documents (see other attached screenshot; won’t they inherit the permissions from the context?)
Quote from: BobRay at Jan 18, 2011, 01:38 PM

Are you the admin Super User, or not?

yes, i am;

@esnyder:
Quote from: esnyder at Jan 18, 2011, 01:48 PM

This is a total guess, but maybe for some reason the general public does not have permission to access the web context of the site? Check the Access Permissions for the web context (system->contexts->right-click web->update context) and make sure the user group (anonymous) has Load Only access. If that’s not it, I would go through the security settings - access controls, resource groups etc and see if you can find any setting that looks like it’s limiting public access to the resources.

user group anonymous has load only access (authority is set to 9999, whatever that means); i changed that to the settings that the administrator has, with no effect!
i went through all settings that look like limiting access, but with my little knowledge of modx i found nothing alarming; maybe it’s really somthing obvious that a advanced user would see at once, but i don’t;

Quote from: esnyder at Jan 18, 2011, 01:48 PM

I’m not sure why this would have changed, but it seems like something related to security and permissions would create the symptoms you describe.

agreed; but what?

i changed that to the settings that the administrator has

Don’t do that! Although that does suggest that it doesn’t have anything to do with access privileges and something else is going on, but I’m afraid I’m out of ideas as to what it is.

That one page, "Partner," looks like it’s not published (its name is in italics). But if you’re getting the same problem with other pages, then that’s not the issue, as it looks like those are published.

I think the problem may be your use of the "element" policy for a Context Access ACL entry. That shouldn’t be there. Instead, you should assign a policy based on the Administrator policy template.