Support/Comments for Janitor 1.3-beta

This is an auto-generated topic for Janitor 1.3-beta by shamblett.

Brief Description:

Janitor is a 3PC that assists site maintainers with everyday maintenance tasks. It consists of utilities to assist with database functions, database backup, FTP transfers, log file clearance and upgrade preparation.
It utilises robust 3rd party applications such as SQLBuddy and integrates them into a single component giving site administrators a single tool to use from one place, rather than a plethora of external ones as is usually the case.
Please read the User Guide in /assets/components/janitor/docs before using this component, especially the section on Security.
This version is functionally complete except for the Events tab, this is still under development.
A Link Checker tab has been added in this release and the user guide updated.

First of all, thanks for Janitor... great work.

Some observations on 1.3.0

- Link check did not worked for me... it went into an
endless loop saying it was working but at the end came out
with a dialog indicating it did not work.

- The upgrade tab is great, thanks. To make it better maybe you
can make it like a manual workflow for an upgrade.
-- Use your "Preparer" to clean the installation
-- The backup of the database can be made with SQLBuddy or phpMyBackupPro, right in the manager.
-- But I could not find a way to select and compress files in the FTP tab. Have a look at eXtplorer (http://extplorer.sourceforge.net/), it can make all FTP, compress, extract, etc... could be a great alternative...
-- The above can be used to compress the required folders and files (assets, core, components, .htaccess, index.php, etc.) and compress them and to download the backup. Upload the MODx new version and to extract it right there.

- Search is really great with all the options!

- SQL Buddy, phpMyBackupPro and FTP work as intended... with my observations above.

Wonderful idea and better implementations... keep up the good work...

Link check did not worked for me...

Please check that the /assets/components/janitor/tmp folder is writeable by your webserver and if there are any files in it.

I hadn’t thought about a backup workflow combining the tools but yes, I could add this to the User Guide along the lines you have suggested.

I’ll have a look at eXtplorer and see if it can be used as a replacement.

Your right about Extplorer, definitely a superior FTP client, I’ll switch to this in the next release of Janitor. This is one reason why the tabs are generic in name, e.g. the FTP tab doesn’t suggest any implementation so we can pick and chose the best fits here.

Please check that the /assets/components/janitor/tmp folder is writeable by your webserver and if there are any files in it.

There is no tmp folder in that directory and I tried creating one and it did not
let me...

Hmm, it should be created on installation. Did you do an upgrade? If so I need to cater for this.

You need to create it as your webserver user then Janitor can write the linkcheck log into it. Actually I’ll put in a check for this in 1.4, there’s no point leaving people waiting for the link check when it won’t work!

Yes, two upgrades, went to Revo 2.0.3 and Janitor 1.3.0 (don’t remember the order).
I am supposed to be the webserver user, not the "master" (I am a reseller of shared hosting)...
I will check what is going on

Great addon, thanks for the hard work.

There seems to be an issue with pMBP backup though, I don’t know how to get it to dump using UTF-8 or other encoding, so non-latin characters in my database get outputted as question marks (????).

This probably can’t be solved here, I’m just warning other users! As it is, Janitor 1.3b will NOT backup your database properly if it contains non-latin characters.

Perhaps someone here knows how to fix this? What encoding does Modx use anyway? I’m a total beginner in this area, sorry.

Using: MODx Revolution 2.0.0-pl rev7212

Thanks for pointing this out, I’ll have a look at this, also other users have reported that SQLBuddy on the database tab has a backup facility, maybe you could have a look at this to see if this will work for you.