OpenVMS VAMP Board

e107 really is my favourite of the myriad of portal packages out there, it's clean, looks good is beautifully designed, scalable & well supported by the community at large. It is also, of course, open source.

I've managed to get it installed and running uncut on my VAMP system however some of the functions do not work. There are no errors as such, the links in question simply fail to produce the expected page.

I am relatively new at PHP, but being a coder by trade will have a look at the causes of this shortly; my prediction is that nothing too onerous is happening and an untrapped PHP error is simply throwing the page request.

This is my top priority - I will post progress as and when.

OK, I spent last night debugging one particular page, 'usersettings.php'

It's a frustrating experience as the only real way to trace is to use 'print' statements which is slow, slwo, slow. MOD_PHP doesn't seem to generate errors, ever. Well, that's not completely true, it will if it encounters a parsing error i.e. the PHP syntax is wrong. What it won't do is generate a run-time error if the code is faulty, i.e. you reference an array element which doesn't exist. What actually happens is the pasrer just bombs out and you get nothing back, which in practice means the page doesn't change.

This brings me back to a point I've made elsewhere: the lack of options in 'php.ini'. Which of the standard set does MOD_PHP understand? All of them? There may well be some options in there that would let e107 run unaltered. Now wouldn't that be nice. Unfortunately I can't seem to find any information on this.

So, bottom line is, I've now got this page working by correcting a few bugs. How much work will it be to get the whole framework running smoothly? I'll keep you posted.

How are things working now?

What version were you talking about?
It would be a good idea to post the bugs, caveats, problems found - and solutions or workarounds, if applicable - so others could be helped. When installing a newer release, there is the ability to check if these bugs and problems still exist and if so, re-apply the chnages and re-use the workarounds (or remove them in an upgrade)

Willem