Reasons for "white screens of death"

Sounds good! Anyway - that does not help users and admins today. And it shouldnt be the recommended solution. A easier Installer would do the trick (I guess). You need zip on the server anyway, so the very first installer / unpacker could use it.

Next reason for "misbehavoir" of the backend:

You have activated friendly url's via .htaccess. That means: you have renamed ht.access to .htaccess in the root folder. If you rename the ht.access in the manager folder, too, the manager will fail.

That will look like this: frontend: all fine. Backend: you can login, you have the top menu, but the included scripts cant be loaded. so the dashboard does not appear, neither doest the resources tree.

If you look into the managers source code (html in the browser, not the php stuff), you can click on all the includes scripts. Some css files might lead to real content, but if you click on or similar, you will get a 401 error or even nothing. In that case you know: its likely that your issue is about .htaccess and mod_rewrite.

Solution: go into the manger folder, rename .htaccess back to ht.access [ed. note: gallenkamp last edited this post 11 years, 9 months ago.]

Hi,

I have installed MODx Revolution 2.2.4 on two different hosts, both using Softaculous in CPanel. Both default installations give me the WSOD.

angelos.ca/upgrade (eleven2 - PHP info: angelos.ca/info.php)
stouffville.info/modx (innoHosting - PHP info: stouffville.info/info.php)

Every other time I've installed MODx I haven't had a problem.

Any ideas?

Glenn

1) angelos.ca/upgrade/connectors/lang.js.php can not be accessed. Look into the source code of the login window under upgrage/manager and click on the link in the source code. You'll see the 401.

2) same with the other site.

401 is about a missing user permissions on the web server. So, the wile / folder is there, but you're not allowed to see / use / open it. Does that help you? Maybe you have to change folder permissions from 755 to 777 or similar. But honestly: I am not a server expert

Try a bit and always undo your steps if they dont work out!

Today, I found another reason why MODX Manager might behave strange:
If /connectors is 777 instead of 755, some hosters might block the output of lang.js.php and other scripts. This results in a missing resources tree on the left of the manager window.

I wrote a script to help test for common problems that cause the WSOD (among other errors):

https://github.com/craftsmancoding/modx_utils/blob/master/test_config.php

Nice script!

Another possible reason I found out it that php is running as apache instead of FastCGI. In that case, /core/packages needs a complete chown, and so does /core/cache.

Quote from: gallenkamp at Dec 14, 2012, 06:33 AM

Another possible reason I found out it that php is running as apache instead of FastCGI. In that case, /core/packages needs a complete chown, and so does /core/cache.

Yeah: there are a lot of ways to set up Apache and PHP, and permissions can factor in heavily. MODX is permissions sensitive -- usually I run the upgrade script to retest permissions. I think the "easiest" setup from the point of the users and devs is to have a server running suexec, but that's harder for the sysadmin to setup. If you're running PHP in FastCGI or DSO mode, then yeah, you gotta watch the user and group that Apache runs as. Makes me appreciate the sysadmins more when I run into these things.