Invisible 500 internal server error?

I think this topic needs attention in the main documentation, as it can cause severe SEO problems. All script snippets with events like "OnWebPagePrerender" with errors in it can be a reason for this "500 Internal Server Error", which does not display in browsers but prevents bots from reading the pages.

In our case we had a website falling from place 3 to unfindable in Google, because the search engine marked the website as unreachable. We searched days to find the reason for this behavior until we tested the website in the W3C validator - which showed the 500 error. The reason for this was an email obfuscation script snippet with a PHP error in it which nobody noticed as it did not show up to website users.

Maybe a warning message (like: "Check script function thoroughly as malfunction could provoke invisible server errors.") should appear when marking these events in MODx snippets?

hi,

yesterday, i had the same error 500 only with IE when i logged out from a webuser account, so i do an ugly snippet to force redirect after loggout and it works.

But today i noticed that the html validator didn’t validate too so i desactiveate PHX plugin and then all is ok.

modx install is 0963

Quote from: manu at Mar 17, 2009, 10:12 PM

hi,

yesterday, i had the same error 500 only with IE when i logged out from a webuser account, so i do an ugly snippet to force redirect after loggout and it works.

But today i noticed that the html validator didn’t validate too so i desactiveate PHX plugin and then all is ok.

modx install is 0963

This has nothing to do with logging out (see WebLogin snippet) or PHx, so I’m not sure what to tell you other than it sounds like something is wrong with some scripts in your site. Without additional details, there is no way to tell, but this is definitely not related to the original point of this thread.

Quote from: OpenGeek at Mar 18, 2009, 02:15 PM

Quote from: manu at Mar 17, 2009, 10:12 PM

hi,

yesterday, i had the same error 500 only with IE when i logged out from a webuser account, so i do an ugly snippet to force redirect after loggout and it works.

But today i noticed that the html validator didn’t validate too so i desactiveate PHX plugin and then all is ok.

modx install is 0963

This has nothing to do with logging out (see WebLogin snippet) or PHx, so I’m not sure what to tell you other than it sounds like something is wrong with some scripts in your site. Without additional details, there is no way to tell, but this is definitely not related to the original point of this thread.

well ok, i don’t want to investigate more on this now because the site is in production and there is no more error 500. Thanx for your answer.

Hello.
I reply to this topic only to report what happened to me.
The bug appeared again in Modx 1.0.4 (yeah, I know we’re in the 0.9.6.1 forum).
I’m running www.zipgenius.it on Modx 1.0.4 and Google refused to read my sitemaps with a 500 error.
In my case I had to disable the "FileDownloadPlugin" v1.2.

Thanks for tip about flawed plugins

Quote from: ZipGenius at Jul 12, 2010, 09:29 AM

Hello.
I reply to this topic only to report what happened to me.
The bug appeared again in Modx 1.0.4 (yeah, I know we’re in the 0.9.6.1 forum).
I’m running www.zipgenius.it on Modx 1.0.4 and Google refused to read my sitemaps with a 500 error.
In my case I had to disable the "FileDownloadPlugin" v1.2.

Thanks for tip about flawed plugins

-> ->

Just finished a site three weeks ago which my client was extremely happy with. Today, he called me up complaining that while searching Google his Google searches were not showing up. Couldn’t figure out what the problem was and ran into a post that mentioned http://web-sniffer.net/... So I put my site in and received the 500 error. From the other posts it seems that 500 errors prevent Google from indexing your site. I then looked at any Plugins that I had installed and disabled them one by one, refreshing the web-sniffer in between. Finally came upon Photo Gallery Plus and now I’m in business... Hope this helps someone!

Hi everyone

I had/have the same problem with several sites, in some of them heavily use of PHx and Filedownload. In one case a site disappeared completely from the google indexes. Is there a way to update the two Plugins to work again? In a hugh site that just went online I even use PHx to give the client the ability to select himself between 2 and 3 column layout. I really would not know how to solve this problem without PHx.

I think there are others a well having this exact same problem, but haven’t realized it yet. That is really bad news.

Your help is much appreciated.

Update: with Filedownload 2.6 the Plugin is not needed - Filedownload works anyhow. The Problem with PHx is, when adding
, then the snippet makes the trouble. If this is removed, PHx works as well.

I have been very successful in using TVs for allowing choice of layout and css. Actually, I never of my own choice use PHx for anything other than internal snippet chunk tpl processing (Ditto and Jot, for example); in other words I have never installed the PHx plugin on any sites of my own design. Simple snippets and TVs work just as well without all the side effects. I’ve never hidden my opinion on having a scripting language (phx) built on top of a scripting language (php). I’ve never seen the advantage of it; "it’s easier for non-PHP programmers" doesn’t cut any ice, there’s no difference between learning PHx syntax for conditionals and learning PHP to do the same thing without the extra layer of script processing.

Hi Susan,

I am running into these 'invisible 500 errors' due to using PHx for simple conditional processing. How would you use PHP in a simple and straight forward way to achieve the same as:

[+phx:if=`[*sideQuotes*]`:is=`Show`:then=`{{sidebarQuote}}`:else=``+]

It seems like more work to have to create a Snippet for each conditional you want to test for - or am I missing something? Would you replace this with a Snippet where you pass in parameter values, or???

If I want to use several conditional tests and TVs to control elements in the front-end (if TV value='X', then show 'Y', etc), it seems like PHx is a big timesaver - if it wasn't causing these errors, of course .

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!