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#51 Re: Backlight Support » Vegas slideshow on home page not showing » 2016-12-01 12:36:39
I've noticed intermittent problems with the Vegas full screen slideshow on the four of the five sections of http://www.sunfox.com/ that uses it.
Sometimes it will load just fine, sometimes the page just sits there and doesn't run the slideshow. Sometimes kicking the refresh button will work, sometimes it won't.
Watching the page load under Firefox's debugger, the times where you just see the burger menu and the masthead show that the Vegas scripts don't completely finish loading. I can't tell if there is a race condition in the page for scripts being loaded or my host (Lunarpages) just failing to serve up the scripts.
Chrome also exhibits this behaviour but it's also wonderfully inconsistent as to when it will do it. Clearing template caches and browser caches might fix things in the short term but after a while it goes back to the intermittent load failures.
When the slideshow kicks off properly, you can see a boatload more scripts get served up and loaded and then it's usually OK as long as the browser isn't closed.
My gut is telling me that the shared server I'm on is probably dropping requests from the initial page load but there's nothing in the logs that prove this and no obvious Javascript nastiness appearing in the debugger. I'm debating about moving one of my sites over to Bluehost but recent posts about their stability and problems with EMAIL has made me hold off for now.
Sorry about the rambling (working on about five hours sleep in two days)...just thought I'd throw my two cents in and hope that maybe it turns out to be something simple in code after all.
#52 Re: Backlight Support » errors upgrading to 1.1 » 2016-11-11 23:25:15
Updated Backlight components to 1.1, uploaded, then hit Backlight admin main/designer/publisher to update the databases (the publisher database update ran longer than usual but still completed successfully), and finally cleared template cache.
I hit some pages after the update and all appears well! Even some intermittent weirdness I had noticed with Theatre's Vegas full-screen presentation a while ago (sometimes it wouldn't load properly and then you hit refresh and it worked)...desktop/iPhone/iPad are now consistently hitting the Vegas presentation...woo hoo!).
Lightroom publisher showing the new fields for Tray 2 for a Backlight album and hidden copy fields for a CE4 album as expected...haven't tried publishing yet but I don't anticipate any problems (I'd test it now but I have to get some snacks for my daughter's slumber party with her football team this evening...this is one mission you DO NOT WANT TO FAIL when there are 14 girls against you! 
#53 Re: Backlight Showcase » Migration CE4 > Backlight complete » 2016-11-02 23:38:21
Wow...your site is pretty much along the lines of what I would like studios.redvixen.com to be like when it grows up from CE4 to Backlight! Too bad there isn't an option in Backlight for the "Daniel Leu" theme to make it much easier for us programmer nerds who are much better at function than making it pretty (dammit Jim, I'm a database weenie...not a CSS maven!)...
Such a clean interface and all of that gratuitous San Francisco porn is a very happy bonus (I really loved the ones you caught of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft passing through the Golden Gate as it was ferrying the Space Shuttle to LAX). Your pictures are making me want to hop a wind to SFO and get me some Hunan Home's on Jackson Street (by far the best Chinese food I've ever had!)...only regret was being stupid in walking back up the steep as hell hill to the cable car to get back to Fisherman's Wharf rather than acquiescing to gravity and a very full stomach and going down the hill to catch Muni! 
So far, I've only converted my personal site to Backlight (and totally love it...one Backlight fed by five publisher instances which is *SO* much better than dealing with the web module which was slow as hell even on this G751 gaming laptop!). I'm in the process of figuring out the infrastructure I want on the back-end (gods below...so many choices, so little time!) before I bring the studios site over to Backlight.
#54 Re: Backlight Support » Custom 404 page » 2016-11-02 23:05:53
I'm building 404 handling into Backlight for 1.1. It should allow you to set the message text in Markdown format, and will be placed within a Backlight page template.
Handling this for invalid page links (e.g. http://mysite.com/broken/) is straightforward. Handling for galleries less so. We had issues in the past where invalid gallery links were handled by the galleries function, which broke the paths to resources in the generated templates. We need to be careful to avoid that scenario.
Are you planning on adding handling for the other common errors (500 in particular comes to mind) in addition to 404?
#55 Re: Backlight Support » Updating Publisher in LR... problem. » 2016-11-02 23:03:28
I've noticed that no matter how many times I click Save in LR Publisher Manager, the TTG Publisher in the Publisher Services list to the left indicates TTG Publisher is Not Saved.
You can safely ignore that...LR publisher bug not reflecting that you've saved the publisher instance configuration. If you click a different one and then go back to the one you were playing with, you should see the settings were persisted properly.
#56 Re: Backlight Support » Possible to have Multiple Album set Pages? » 2016-11-02 22:59:22
You don't necessarily need a second Publisher instance to feed the Backlight galleries by year.
On my personal website (http://www.sunfox.com/), I had a ton of content from 2003-2015 from various "frameworks" ending with CE4 in 2015 that I just didn't have the time or desire to convert to Backlight.
For each section of the site, I ended up making a clean break for 2016 to Backlight (only had to convert about 4-5 months of 2016 CE4 content by creating the new BL publisher instance, copying over the album sets/albums with their copy, and then deleting the CE4 publisher instance when I was done) with the tree in Publisher looking like this:
2016 (album set)
+
|
+ --- + 201601xx - January 2016 (album set)
|
+------ 20160106-Pensive Katie (album)
|
+ ----- entry (album)
The menu item for the current year points to the top-level album set 2016...on New Year's, a new top-level album set will be created for 2017, the current link updated to the URL for the 2017 album set, and the link for 2016 will be moved to the archived galleries page (which captures links to the previous years...it's manually created using the responsive grid framework but that turned out to be the best way to integrate the old stuff and the new Backlight content.
Now, I do have multiple publisher instances servicing the five different sections of the site but this allowed me to have one Backlight installation to rule them all and allow me to easily maintain consistent templates and menus/organisation between the various sections.
#57 Re: Backlight Support » Delete Album » 2016-09-10 00:46:42
For Windows, I've come to prefer BeyondCompare which makes updating Backlight trivial (once I got past some stupid filters I'd accidentally left in the profile I was cloning that skipped the skeleton .sq3 files, for instance).
What I do is this:
- Apply the Backlight update to the local filesystem which is usually a matter of just deleting directories in modules and copying over the new stuff.
- Kick off BeyondCompare with a "mirror right" profile that compares the local Backlight directory to the remote with the data subdirectory filtered out of the results. This will identify anything on the remote side that differs from local which I can easily sanity check. Click [Sync] and about a minute later it's done.
- Log into Backlight on the remote site and do the steps to update the databases, clear cache as directed in the update.
Would it be lovely to have something like Wordpress does where it updates the Wordpress code/installation from a remote server? Yes...but I also know just how much work that would entail just for the base Backlight installation, to say nothing of all of the combinations including Cart and Theatre and whatever other add-ons will come.
In the mean time, I've never been a big fan of manually copying things round like we used to do when Oracle's patches before opatch were an executable and about 20 pages of manual instructions of scripts to reload (like the java subsystem, that one was always fun!) and administrative tasks to perform. Ewww...bad memories resurfacing! Oracle's patching system since gotten a lot better/easier (because Microsoft SQL Server was kicking their heineys in terms of administrative ease of use for years on end!) but it was not an easy project to pull off.
But Backlight's update is nothing compared to the nasty Oracle updates of yesteryear...I think most people would think features and bug fixes before worrying about making the patching hands-off...
#58 Re: Backlight Support » Visible photo / collection counts for Album Sets? » 2016-09-08 21:25:11
I took the liberty of peeking at the database after posting that thinking that the counts were captured in the tables but I didn't see any columns or views computing them.
The query to compute the counts would be simple enough but I can understand the performance hit not being worth the extra complexity.
Perhaps one day those counts (and other useful metadata about albums/sets) could be exposed as an API that we could get at using PHPlugins and use to render custom HTML. I seem to recall another question recently about the feasibility of caption information being used in the Photoswipe galleries...this might be another case where PHPlugins and an API might solve the problem. But I'd rank that relatively low on the list of things to do for Backlight...would be nice to be able to get at the metadata within the framework but getting the base functionality for the non-programmers is even more important.
I do appreciate you guys bearing with me as I have these wild inspirations...sometimes it's hard for me to remember that SQLite isn't MySQL or Oracle and that some of the nice shiny toys I have there aren't available in SQLite. What's really cool is how Backlight's framework now allows us to do or think about the possibilities of things we can do that I don't think CE4 would have been able to do given the restrictions of Lightroom's web module.
#59 Backlight Support » Visible photo / collection counts for Album Sets? » 2016-09-08 02:35:14
- SunFoxNC
- Replies: 3
How hard would it be to implement a visible indicator for album sets that could display either the number of photos or album sets contained by a given item in the grid?
I use the Iconic layout for the album sets in play on www.sunfox.com and there are times I think it'd be nice to warn the users when they're contemplating clicking on what may be a big gallery. I could manually do it in the text/caption but if the collection were to ever change in the future, I'd have to remember to fix the number in the caption.
I'd really love it if it were clever enough to figure out that if the cell represents an album set that it'd count the number of albums in that set and if the cell is an album, the number of photos in the album (perhaps with different styling so you'd know if you were looking at a photo count). Something like being able to configure three possible options for the album set to compute the counts to be displayed (number of collections only, number of photos only, or the combination I described above).
Thoughts?
#60 Re: Backlight Support » Backlight Theater Not Updating » 2016-09-06 23:20:52
I went back to the EMAIL for Backlight+Pages 1.0.4 and clicked download and that served up R2 for me...
#61 Re: Backlight Support » Backlight Theater Not Updating » 2016-09-06 23:01:11
Another twist to the Vegas full screen and forced refresh...I just updated to Backlight+Pages 1.0.4 R2 and Theater 1.0.1 this morning and cleared cache as requested for the update.
I've got four full-screen presentations on www.sunfox.com...the first one required manually forcing the refresh in FireFox, but the second one didn't. The third one required the refresh, but the fourth one didn't. Don't know if that helps to track down why this happens but it seemed an interesting pattern nonetheless...
Theater 1.0.1 also seemed to solve some goofy behaviour I had noticed with the Vegas fullscreen slideshow on the iPhone...before the update, nothing I could do would get it to display the slideshow on my iPhone 6 Plus. After the update, I hit refresh a couple of times and it'd load the images and run the slideshow...but often when I was holding the phone in portrait orientation (and then it'd keep going once I turned it on its side). The iPad and the desktop displayed it just fine.
#62 Re: Backlight Support » Backlight Theater Not Updating » 2016-09-05 01:20:02
I've noticed that the first time a device/browser hits a Vegas full page after I've changed it to a Theatre-based page, I'll see the masthead and the burger and nothing else but then if I force the page to reload, all is well afterward. I've also had to clear the template cache from time to time when it seems "stuck".
That suggests to me that there is a bootstrapping issue on first load of the page by the browser.
(All in all, though...it's nice having the full screen presentation available again! I'm still on the fence about using the navigation rather than the [Enter] button that was in play by default in CE4 Stage...the [Enter] button was cleaner to me but having consistent navigation options available on both the full page presentation and the other pages through Backlight does present some advantages as well, particularly on mobile.)
#63 Backlight Showcase » www.sunfox.com now live on Backlight! » 2016-08-25 02:04:27
- SunFoxNC
- Replies: 0
Before I really get into this, let me say that Backlight has been an absolute joy to use...seeing the changes to the pages generated out of the Backlight templates in near real-time has been well worth the price of admission! And even doing a full rebuild of the site manually was pretty simple by cutting-and-pasting the relevant bits from the old CE4 published collections to their new Backlight publisher counterparts.
Thanks to the very active support in the support forum, I was able to convert the five subdomains (four CE4 installations and one test Backlight installation) that comprised www.sunfox.com into a single Backlight installation that rules the five current sections of the site. I ended up doing a full rebuild of the site rather than promote the one test Backlight installation to the root and run the conversion...there were a few things I wasn't fond of in the test installation and wanted to start clean.
Ironically, of the subdomain publisher instances being converted...the Backlight test installation was actually the most painful one! I would make a change to the templates and they would show up in the database but then the live pages wouldn't update and would give an error saying something went wrong and it couldn't find the album set template with ID xxxxx. It took about 90 minutes before I realised that I had never deleted the Backlight folder in the subdomain and when I was going to the live site, it was looking at the old copies of the database that I wasn't updating. Once I deleted the old Backlight installation in the subdirectory that was somehow being picked up by the live pages, everything proceeded quite nicely.
Had I promoted the single Backlight installation to root and ran the conversion, I probably would have avoided that pain but all's well that ends well! Self-inflicted pain and stupidity does not take away from what has turned out to an excellent product that has had much fewer bugs than one would expect from what is a huge port of the CE4 code base!
---
Anywho, the site in question is a photo history primarily about my kids with content started in 2003 and having gone through a couple of iterations culminating with CE4 and now Backlight to drive the site. As a result, I had a lot of content I wanted to maintain access to but it's way too massive to convert everything to Backlight so the decision was taken that 2015 and prior would remain as-is and 2016 would be the year of Backlight and links back to the archived stuff.
I had previously gone back and forth about having multiple Backlight installations and having one rule them all in this thread:
The "One Backlight to Rule Them All" Stream of Consciousness
I had thought about going the full-on subdomain route but problems with Lunarpages and their handling of the subdomains led me to rethink that strategy and I ended up adopting a hybrid of what Rod and I were talking about...one Backlight at the root with all of the new Pages content at the root and liberal use of the responsive grid layout (VERY NICE...MUCH SUCCESS!!! ) to integrate the archival content (2015-before) with the current 2016 content on Backlight.
What really makes it work is that the slugs have a naming scheme that incorporates the section the galleries appear in and having a publisher instance feeding each section means that the publisher album sets/albums don't get too unwieldy and I can push the section's galleries into that section's subdirectory in case I ever want to snapshot that section of the site. This effectively gave me what I really wanted from the AutoIndex-based solution I had done before but in a much more manageable way.
At the end of the year, the galleries that show up under the current galleries tab will be manually moved under a new entry on the archived galleries page but this is something I've had to do anyway and it's usually when I revisit the mastheads or galleries of the "best of the best" images that were being hosted by the Stage gallery on each section's main page.
Ultimately, the big advantage to have only one Backlight installation in this domain to update with new versions and it being much easier to share the common look-and-feel of the templates I was wanting for all of the sub-sites was what led me to decide against the multiple Backlight installations in this domain.
Next up will be converting Red Vixen Studios and its satellites to Backlight...
#64 Backlight Support » Lunarpages strikes again! » 2016-08-16 22:59:23
- SunFoxNC
- Replies: 0
Something went wrong
Unexpected error: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20131226/sqlite.so' - /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20131226/sqlite.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0
Please report error at http://community.theturninggate.net
===========
The shared server where my sites are being hosted was upgraded last week to a much more modern version of the server software including PHP (had been on 5.3.x, now running 5.6.24).
The first thing I had noticed was that PDO and SQLite and were turned off and the extensions directory had changed which broke CE4/Backlight and another PHP application I had written so I had to fix them in php.ini:
memory_limit = 64M
extension_dir = "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20131226"
extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_sqlite.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so
extension=sqlite.so
This resulted in the error message given above. After banging my head on the problem for a bit, I discovered that sqlite got booted out of the main PHP distribution in PHP 5.4.x...to make the error message go away, we need to comment out sqlite.so:
memory_limit = 64M
extension_dir = "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20131226"
extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_sqlite.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so
; extension=sqlite.so
Everything is happy again!
I am liking the new Lunarpages server configuration (in particular, they seemed to have dramatically reduce the amount of spam making it to my inbox so instead of trashing about 800-1000 EMAILs a day on the iPhone, I'm only having to trash about 5 that get by the filters...yay!)...the PHP breakage that impacted a client and me, not so much!
#65 Backlight Support » New Cart install - Getting "Database Disk Image Is Malformed" error » 2016-07-26 07:04:28
- SunFoxNC
- Replies: 0
On my Backlight test domain (williams.sunfox.com), I updated Backlight+Pages to 1.0.3 and CRG to 7.0.1 and having just purchased Cart, I unzipped Cart into Backlight's modules directory as well figuring I'd get all of them in one shot.
When I logged into Backlight Admin, the Backlight+Pages and CRG updates went fine but when I went to hit the Cart in the menu, I got the stack trace reproduced below.
=======
Stack trace
=======
SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 11 database disk image is malformed|
#0 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/framework/dao/PdoExtended.php(524): PDO->prepare('select * from s...')
#1 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/framework/dao/PdoExtended.php(156): PdoExtended->_prepareAndExecuteSqlQuery('select * from s...', Array)
#2 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/framework/dao/GenericSettingsDAO.php(25): PdoExtended->selectRows('select * from s...', Array)
#3 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/modules/module-cart/application/helpers/CartConfigManager.php(15): GenericSettingsDAO->getData(Object(CartConfigManager))
#4 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/modules/module-cart/application/helpers/ApplicationHelper.php(53): CartConfigManager->merge(Object(SettingsDAO), Array)
#5 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/framework/helpers/GenericApplicationHelper.php(28): ApplicationHelper->createConfigManager()
#6 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/modules/module-cart/application/init.php(9): GenericApplicationHelper->getConfigManager()
#7 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/framework/init.php(137): require_once('/home/redvix2/p...')
#8 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/modules/module-cart/index.php(35): require_once('/home/redvix2/p...')
#9 /home/redvix2/public_html/sunfox/williams/backlight/cart/index.php(7): include_once('/home/redvix2/p...')
#10 {main}|URL: /backlight/cart/index.php
I tried deleting the unzipped Cart add-on locally and on the server and re-uploading and nothing seems to do the trick.
Also, I get the following message referencing the Cart failure on every link on the site I click:
===
The shopping cart is currently unavailable
Please contact the site owner for further assistance.
===
Thoughts as to what I should try next?
===============================================================
SOLVED: I tried one last hail Mary before hitting the [Submit] on this posting...I took a peek at the Cart module's skeleton directory and compared the .sq3 files to the ones found in backlight/data/cart and sure enough, they were slightly different in file size.
Figuring I had nothing to lose as I haven't configured Cart yet, I dropped the skeleton .sq3 files over the top of the ones in backlight/data/cart, forced them to upload and replace the existing files. I then logged out of Backlight and back in and hit the Cart menu...now it's happy!
I suspect the corruption might have occurred because my normal Beyond Compare upload profile's set of filters omits master.sq3 from the upload but I sometimes forget to use a different profile to upload everything for a new add-on module. Usually Backlight is kind enough to let me know the problem existed between my chair and the keyboard, I upload the master.sq3 file(s) and then we're usually good.
I this case, I suspect that may have triggered a transient error when hitting Cart that first time that accidentally rubbished the database file and that once the database file was wrecked, I was really in the ditch.
So, the takeaways for me are:
- Don't try to be a clever Dick and mix installing a new module with upgrading existing ones. Do the upgrades first and make them happy!
- First time installing a new module, upload the whole bloody thing straightaway with no files filtered!
#66 Re: Backlight Support » AutoIndex Enabler functionality? » 2016-07-01 04:44:54
I already had CE4 installed and managing each of the sub-domain sites on sunfox.com (except for williams.sunfox.com which is my Backlight test site) and what I was hoping to achieve was one Backlight installation at the root of sunfox.com to essentially rule all the sub-domain sites so that I can define the configuration and templates globally (and make updates easier so that I only have to update one installation rather than five).
I was able to create a test instance of Publisher and point the top-level directories parameter at an arbitrarily deep relative path from the root and then create the path manually with the FTP client so Publisher has a valid location to push the album sets/albums.
But poking round in the Backlight admin, it doesn't seem like I'm able to create a new page at an arbitrary folder depth/location from the root of the Backlight installation (i.e. the page creation doesn't have a top-level directory parameter analogue to the Publisher configuration option).
Also, the current CE4 implementation is able to combine the links published galleries with the links I put into the galleries directory using AutoIndex Enabler...without Enabler in Backlight, I would have to split the Backlight managed galleries (which are based on calendar years) from the legacy content and provide two menu links (one to the Backlight-managed galleries, the other to the index page based on the TTG responsive framework Rod has suggested).
So the legacy content I want to preserve seems to rule out the idea of "one Backlight to bring them in and in the darkness bind them!"
I could try to force the "one Backlight" strategy anyway but the more I've thought about it, the downside of essentially ditching the Pages and templating framework except at the root is much much worse than setting up and maintaining multiple Backlight installations for the sub-domains. The whole point of going to CE4 and Backlight was to have a lot less work once the templates were designed and in play...the previous two iterations of this site were custom HTML that I definitely wanted to leave in the past!
Now that I'm committed to the multiple Backlight strategy (at least for this domain!), I might go ahead and make the root a simple Backlight installation in its own right with the index page to the sub-domains so that I might be able to take advantage of the full-screen slideshow when Stage functionality arrives in Backlight (I know there have been some CE4/Backlight hybrids done out there but I'm willing to wait for that functionality).
#67 Backlight Support » AutoIndex Enabler functionality? » 2016-06-30 02:07:09
- SunFoxNC
- Replies: 3
(My apologies for the stream of consciousness you're about to see here...I'm trying to think through the various options to allow me to upgrade a huge site with legacy content from CE4 to Backlight. With that in mind...)
-------
Just out of curiosity, how would one go about getting AutoIndex Enabler (which is essentially autoindex.xml and a thumbnail with support for links in autoindex.xml itself) sort of functionality in Backlight+Pages?
The reason I ask this is that last year when I re-positioned the various top-level folders of www.sunfox.com into constituent sub-domains (each with an installation of CE4 and a CE4 publisher pointing to it), I used AutoIndex Enabler to provide a link to the sub-domain and a custom thumbnail from the main page which was an AutoIndex template.
Within each of the sub-domain sites, AutoIndex and Enabler was used to provide links in the main gallery to the original HTML for gallery years 2003-2015 with the various publisher instances handling 2016 and beyond as a compromise from having to rebuild the entire site which sports over 127K images across its various sites.
Here is a sample filesystem layout for family.sunfox.com:
www.sunfox.com
|
+---- 0001_family.sunfox.com/ (AutoIndex Enabler directory/link for family.sunfox.com)
|
+---- index.php (Top-level iconic auto index for Enabler directories)
|
+---- family/ (family.sunfox.com)
|
+---- galleries/ (CE4 publisher for family.sunfox.com pointing here)
|
+---- images/ (2015 and earlier images live here)
|
+---- ttg-be/ (CE4 installation)
|
+---- 20XXindex.html (2015 and earlier links pages)
|
+---- galleries.php (Sub-domain iconic auto index)
The other subdomains (nicholas, alexander, kathryn, and williams) are done in the same fashion.
With the advent of Backlight, I've come to the conclusion that what I thought was a clever compromise to try to make each sub-domain autonomous and avoid a complete tear-down and rebuild of the content has turned out in fact to be an own goal.
So I've come to the conclusion that when it comes time to cut sunfox.com over to a pure Backlight solution, what I'd like to do is have one Backlight+Pages instance in the root controlling galleries in the various sub-domain sites but still maintain the older standalone content as-is.
I know I won't be able to take advantage of migrating each CE4 sub-domain's published galleries and databases to Backlight and I'm OK with taking my medicine for trying to be too clever by half! I'm also OK with multiple publisher instances to manage galleries for the various sub-domains as that's what I have right now (i.e. I know no single uber-Publisher would be able to maintain the published content as well as the legacy content).
But I rather liked the AutoIndex Enabler behaviour as it allowed me to order the albums explicitly in a way that Lightroom wouldn't easily support and allowed me to maintain the 2015 and earlier content as-is as it's just too massive an undertaking to convert all of that stuff from the much older HTML templates they use to Backlight.
One solution absent Enabler functionality would be to create a new Page instance and menu item for the legacy content and drop in the HTML to simulate the iconic auto index and let publisher manage the real galleries folder.
Another would be a menu for accessing the links to the legacy HTML pages but then I'd lose the iconic thumbnails I thought made it look much better than just a drop menu which is how the previous HTML handled the earlier content.
Are there any other options that you can suggest that I might consider?
Thanks!
#68 Re: Backlight Support » Page copy for galleries - more a what if that a support question » 2016-06-30 00:59:46
The silver lining is that you can use a Markdown-aware editor for the text to minimise the amount of fumbling about to get the text looking as you wish.
Markdown Pad 2 on Windows comes immediately to mind as the one I tend to use but I'm sure there are plenty of others.
#69 Re: Backlight Support » Backlight/Designer/Design_Menu_Set » 2016-05-19 22:45:58
Speaking of the save buttons, sometimes it's not obvious to me when the form is "dirty"...i.e. I've made some changes to it and haven't hit the save button.
Perhaps changing the colour and/or text of the save icons when the page has been edited might be a nice visual cue that the form has been changed.
Full disclosure, I'm not immune to having "squirrel moments" and it ultimately is on me to remember to save things as I know full well how much of a pain in the arse it is to maintain a dirty flag for a page when you've got AJAX and other web-weirdness potentially messing with the form across several browsers! Fortunately, even when I miss a save, I don't tend to flip too many switches so it's usually pretty easy to remember what I was doing.
In terms of the differentiation of buttons, the usual standard I've employed in the past in this scenario is that "Save" means "save and stay on this form" whereas "Submit" is the label we use when we submit the form to the back-end (be it a web service or a RESTful service) and potentially end up somewhere else (assuming form validation didn't fail).
#70 Backlight Support » Did cell numbers in albums go away in Backlight+Pages? » 2016-05-19 22:29:53
- SunFoxNC
- Replies: 1
I've been trying to find the setting to enable cell numbers and haven't been able to find it.
Whilst not a critical thing, it was nice to give another option to people interested in a particular picture to identify it by cell number if the filename wasn't obvious enough or they weren't technically savvy to do cut-and-paste or screenshots.
If push comes to shove, I could use the CellNumber metadata token and probably finagle some custom CSS/PHP to expose it somewhere other than underneath the cell thumbnail but right now I've got some of my grandmother's slides from 1966-1979 to push to my Backlight test site.
Of course, given unlimited wishes and limited hours in the day...I would wish to see the Backlight version of the Client Response Gallery sooner than those cell numbers!
(BTW, I'm totally digging seeing changes to the template show up immediately rather than waiting 1-2 minutes for the Web module to refresh with every little change even on this high-powered G751 gaming laptop...that alone has been worth the price of admission to Backlight! I loved the power of what I could do with CE4 but I'm liking Backlight's architecture and implementation even more...)
#71 Re: Backlight Support » Update / delete of set and album names does not work » 2016-05-17 21:36:29
http://php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#i … er-globals
Might want to check your PHP version on your host as the "feature" (which I agree was horrifically stupid in so many ways) was deprecated in 5.3.x and removed in 5.4.0.
If you are using PHP 5.3.x or lower, that link also shows that you might be able to disable it via .htaccess which your host should permit.
#72 Re: Backlight Support » timezonedb.so reference not found » 2016-05-12 23:40:57
That was my thinking as well...it had caught me by surprise when I uploaded Backlight+Pages 1.0.1 to the hosted subdomain because I hadn't seen that problem on the local WAMP server on my Windows laptop where I had dropped version 1.0.0 to test and kick the tires.
I'll keep you apprised of any Lunarpages-specific weirdness as I encounter them...with that back-level version of PHP they're running, I won't be surprised if there are some more interesting "undocumented features" due to their configuration!
It may be a good idea to collect these sorts of host-specific tips (such as the well-known GoDaddy weirdness, etc.) in the tips forum so that users not on BlueHost will know of any additional configuration they may need to do to avoid these known potholes.
#73 Re: Backlight Support » timezonedb.so reference not found » 2016-05-12 20:57:27
I suspect they're trying to save memory on the shared host by not loading the time zone support lib for PHP if they can avoid it...not many PHP applications are written to be time zone-aware.
This was the post that pointed me to php.ini:
http://forums.anchorcms.com/help/install-help-needed
Lunarpages official help on creating a custom php.ini:
http://wiki.lunarpages.com/Create_php.ini
What mine looks like:
memory_limit = 64M
extension_dir = "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626"
I had to increase the memory_limit directive from 32M (default) to 64M because I had some CE4 galleries that were wrecked with an out-of-memory error from PHP. I was never able to figure out why because the galleries that broke had a smaller number of pictures (roughly 1,600) compared to some that have about 2,300 or so...all split into 100 pictures per page.
FYI, here's the phpinfo dump for my shared server at Lunarpages which is probably reasonably consistent amongst their shared servers (if you want the full version for reference, I can certainly EMAIL it to you):
PHP Version 5.3.27
System Linux libra.lunarpages.com 2.6.9-103.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri Dec 9 04:31:51 EST 2011 i686
Build Date Sep 3 2013 08:14:52
Configure Command './configure' '--disable-fileinfo' '--enable-bcmath' '--enable-calendar' '--enable-exif' '--enable-ftp' '--enable-gd-native-ttf' '--enable-libxml' '--enable-magic-quotes' '--enable-mbstring' '--enable-mysqlnd' '--enable-pdo=shared' '--enable-soap' '--enable-sockets' '--enable-zip' '--prefix=/usr' '--with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php/5.3' '--with-curl=/opt/curlssl/' '--with-freetype-dir=/usr' '--with-gd' '--with-gettext' '--with-imap=/opt/php_with_imap_client/' '--with-imap-ssl=/usr' '--with-jpeg-dir=/usr' '--with-kerberos' '--with-libexpat-dir=/usr' '--with-libxml-dir=/opt/xml2' '--with-libxml-dir=/opt/xml2/' '--with-mcrypt=/opt/libmcrypt/' '--with-mysql=/usr' '--with-mysql-sock=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' '--with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config' '--with-mysqli=mysqlnd' '--with-openssl=/usr' '--with-openssl-dir=/usr' '--with-pcre-regex=/opt/pcre' '--with-pdo-mysql=shared' '--with-pdo-sqlite=shared' '--with-pgsql=/usr' '--with-png-dir=/usr' '--with-pspell' '--with-sqlite=shared' '--with-xmlrpc' '--with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6' '--with-xsl=/opt/xslt/' '--with-zlib' '--with-zlib-dir=/usr'
Server API CGI/FastCGI
Virtual Directory Support disabled
Configuration File (php.ini) Path /usr/lib
Scan this dir for additional .ini files /etc/php/5.3
Additional .ini files parsed /etc/php/5.3/standard_exts.ini, /etc/php/5.3/zend_exts.ini
PHP API 20090626
PHP Extension 20090626
Zend Extension 220090626
Zend Extension Build API220090626,NTS
PHP Extension Build API20090626,NTS
Debug Build no
Thread Safety disabled
Zend Memory Manager enabled
Zend Multibyte Support disabled
IPv6 Support enabled
Registered PHP Streams https, ftps, compress.zlib, php, file, glob, data, http, ftp, phar, zip
Registered Stream Socket Transports tcp, udp, unix, udg, ssl, sslv3, sslv2, tls
Registered Stream Filters zlib.*, convert.iconv.*, mcrypt.*, mdecrypt.*, string.rot13, string.toupper, string.tolower, string.strip_tags, convert.*, consumed, dechunk
#74 Backlight Support » timezonedb.so reference not found » 2016-05-12 19:49:32
- SunFoxNC
- Replies: 4
Just dropped Backlight+Pages into a new subdomain williams.sunfox.com hosted at Lunarpages and got this error:
----
Something went wrong
Unexpected error: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/timezonedb.so' - /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/timezonedb.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0
----
After doing a quick Google, I was able to fix it by adding the following directive to the php.ini file in the website's root directory public_html:
extension_dir = "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626"
Backlight seems to be a happy camper now!
#75 Re: Backlight Support » Error Unable to perform action: getThumbnails » 2016-05-09 23:45:32
Another variation on the error message that occurred after I uploaded the masthead image I use to my Backlight testing site (local installation, WAMP on Windows):
Unable to perform action: getThumbnails
Message: preg_replace(): Compilation failed: unknown property name after \P or \p at offset 12 in ThumbnailFinder.php on line 32
Other than the error message, the site seems to display the masthead and galleries as expected when using the clones of the standard page/album set/album templates I had created (so I'd have the originals to peek at or fall back to as needed).