Comments on It was inevitable - LnBlog 0.3.1 released

  1. another bug?

    Warning: ftp_fput(): /html/blog/fsconfig.php: No such file or directory in /home/virtual/site19/fst/var/www/html/blog/lib/ftpfs.php on line 186

    As a matter of fact, ls -lR |grep fsconfig.php gave me no result.

    • Comment posted on Thursday 14 Dec 2006 at 5:35pm
    • By giorgio

  2. I'm guessing it's the FTP server configuration

    Question: am I correct in assuming that this happens when you try to do the initial file writing configuration? If so, then the reason you aren't seeing fsconfig.php is because the configuration script *creates* it.

    If the above assumption is correct, then I suspect the solution is as simple as changing the 'Root Directory' value when doing the configuration. Basically, we just need to determine how to convert a local path to a path that the FTP server understands. To make a long story short, LnBlog assumes your host configures their FTP servers the same way mine does - each account is restricted to it's own virtual directory and / is mapped to that directory for FTP. Therefore, when LnBlog tries to build paths to pass to FTP, it takes the real local path to the file and strips off the FTP root that you enter in the file writing configuration. The default is to make the FTP root two directories above the LnBlog directory, which is why you get the error about /html/blog/fsconfig.php not existing - /html/blog probably isn't a valid FTP path on your server.

    Basically, the way you would correct this is to log-in to your FTP host, run 'cd /' to get to the FTP root directory, and then run 'ls' and look at the output to figure out where you are. In other words, if you put LnBlog in
    /home/virtual/site19/fst/var/www/html/blog
    then you need to see where in that path you end up. So if, for example, you see 'var' in the output, then odds are your FTP root is /home/virtual/site19/fst, and that's what you would put for the root directory in the file writing configuration.

    I hope that makes sense. If not, or if that doesn't work, let me know. I'd hate to let you down, especially seeing how you're officially the first LnBlog user! (Or the first one to contact me, at least.)

  3. one step further

    Thanks, Peter,
    I understand the configuration for my server is a little bit tricky, but this is what I had from my hosting provider :) Anyway, I could go one step further, because setting as root the path suggested by you, I had access to the admin setup page.
    The following step was to login as administrator, and there I got stopped. No error message, but when I click Submit I always am brought again at the same login page.
    Maybe I have to set some write permission ? and where?

    • Comment posted on Thursday 14 Dec 2006 at 5:35pm
    • By giorgio

  4. No error message?

    Let me get this straight - you were able to create the admin account, but not log in? You just get sent back to the login page?

    When creating the admin login, did you change the the username for the account from the default 'administrator' to something else? If so, this could cause the problem. Currently, LnBlog assumes that the administrator account is named 'administrator' and will not recognize anything else as the admin (despite the fact that I left that box editable). If that's the case, you have two options:

    1) Create the account again and don't edit the username. To do this, just delete the passwd.php file in the LnBlog folder on your server. This is where all user info is stored, so doing this will prompt you to create the account again. You can create a separate account for regular use and give it ownership of any blogs you create. That's what I do, but that's just me.

    2) Change the name of the administrator account. To do this, you'll have to hand-edit the blogconfig.php file in the LnBlog directory. Just find the line that says
    define("ADMIN_USER", "administrator");
    and change 'administrator' to whatever username you like.

    Sorry for all the problems. As I said, I haven't had any users up until now, so QA hasn't exactly been a priority. I really appreciate your feedback, though. I knew the initial setup was a bit rough, but you've already given me some ideas to try to make things smoother for the next release.

    Hopefully that should get you to the interesting part. ;) If you have any more problems or see any places for improvements, just let me know. I'm always open to suggestions.

  5. And there's another bug to fix

    Sorry. Looks like the HTML handling for comments mangled by double-quotes. That line in blogconfig.php should look more like this:
    define('ADMIN_USER', 'administrator');

  6. You were right

    You were right, I changed the administrator name. But I think that wasn't a bug nor a fault by my side, I think that this should be addressed in the installation instructions or in a README file. Now I am into another mess. I tried to setup a blog and I accepted the path ../myblog and this appears not to be correct in my case.
    At the second attempt, I tried the path ./myblog and here is the mess. The blog appears to be created, but it's not possible to write because it seems again that
    there is a path error:
    The requested URL /html/blog/newart.php was not found on this server.
    I am afraid that I can't setup the blog because of the configuration of my hosting, where the http documentroot is a subdirectory of the ftproot :(

    • Comment posted on Thursday 14 Dec 2006 at 5:35pm
    • By giorgio

  7. Hmmm...

    First, I'll definitely address the admin username problem in the next release. The user should not have to worry about that.

    I'm a bit confused by this problem. Just to be clear, your web root directory ABSOLUTELY MUST be somewhere under your FTP root, i.e. you must have FTP access to the HTTP root.

    I'm guessing that the problem lies in the computation of the HTML document root. It looks like your web root is in /home/virtual/site19/fst/var/www/html/, right? LnBlog finds the HTML root by searching up from the current directory and checking against a list of directory names. The list is in the LnBlog lib directory in the file utils.php. It's lines 120 and 121 and they look like this:
    $doc_roots = array("wwwroot", "inetpub", "htdocs", "htsdocs", "httpdocs",
    "httpsdocs", "webroot", "www");
    Just open up that file in a text editor and add "html" at the end of the list after "www" so that it looks like this:
    $doc_roots = array("wwwroot", "inetpub", "htdocs", "htsdocs", "httpdocs",
    "httpsdocs", "webroot", "www", "html");
    That should make the document root calculation work out correctly.

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