I have some fixes in XoopsFormRendererBootstrap5.php for Xoops 2.5.11, but GitHub says "No more forks can be created." when I try to fork XoopsCore25 in order to create a pull request. Do you want me to contribute these changes some other way?

OK. That clears things up. I can imagine it took a long time to find the issue. I've been at this over a week, with much Apache research and several frustrating sessions with Wireshark before I clued in that the 404 was bogus.

So modifying the Xoops 2.5.11 autoload process to exclude the index.php file was not the resolution, and now all modules that use preloads must use the index.html file and not index.php for protection in their preloads/ directory. Is that correct?

Thank you so much for your work here.

Yes, indeed the xsitemap (1.56 FINAL) module does have the preloads/index.php file and replacing it with the preloads/index.php file from the profile module cures the problem. Thank you.

I had suspected the issue was with something in the autoload mechanism, but not fully understanding the details there, I could not make any specific connection. Would you be able to explain why the index.php file with its setting of the header status causes problems whereas the index.html file which just updates the history does not? Where do these files fit into the startup sequence?

Thanks again for your assistance.

Thanks so much for this report.

I have been struggling for days to diagnose a problem with my local test site running under WAMP which does not occur (thankfully) on my live website. I have a button in one of my modules which downloads a dynamically constructed XLSX file, and this suddenly started to hang the server. In addition, the Preview buttons on my DHTML Text Area fields started to report "Server Not Responding ... Please Try later".

After completely reconstructing all my self-signed certificates (the live server has a real certificate), and updating my local Apache logging, I realized that almost all requests to the local test site were returning a 404 status, but the pages themselves were still rendering normally. I got some minimal success by changing the code to force a 200 status when returning the preview text and my XLSX file. But still the Software Engineer in me needed to understand why this functionality suddenly stopped working.

My local test server is a development platform and as such it has several Xoops modules installed which are not on the live server.
I had installed xSitemap (1.56 Final) intending to use it to build a list of all my pages as I transition the site to Xoops 2.5.11 and Bootswatch 5.3. This report encouraged me to look more closely at what was installed on the local test site. When I discovered that both xmnews and xSitemap had the new index.php files mentioned in this post, I uninstalled them as a test. And suddenly things were back to normal.

After some additional tracing and testing, I offer the annotated segment from my Apache access log which clearly demonstrates that there is something about xSitemap when installed in Xoops 2.5.10 that causes the erroneous 404 status in the Http Response.


The scenario is as follows:
1. Start with a clean install of Xoops 2510
2. Install xSitemap and press the button to go to the website Home Page
At this point accessing the website still returns a 200 status.
3. Close the browser and reopen the website
At this point almost all requests return the 404 status.

Installing xSitemap in Xoops 2.5.11 does not have the same result.

The xmnews module does not seem to have the same effect, so I do not think the index.php files could be causing the problem. I have done exhaustive debugging through the site startup with xSitemap installed and I can't see anything that might shed any light on the cause. But something in xSitemap is not playing well with Xoops 2510.

I'm still slogging through the non-trivial changes to update the various templates to use Bootstrap 5 syntax for Forms. I decided to take a break and see what I could do with redirect notifications to eliminate the need for jQuery in my themes since Bootstrap 5 no longer depends on it.

I was a bit disappointed that I could not find a way to override a core event with my own code, but I have published an initial version of a module, XoopsGrowl, which can be used in a Bootstrap 4.x or 5.x theme (using trivial core hacks) to replace the old Xoops template based redirect notification with a JavaScript only implementation using Bootstrap Alerts.

This is my first submission, so feel free to say if there is something I should be doing differently. Also, feel free to incorporate this into the core at your discretion, or ask me to create a pull request making this a selectable option along with jGrowl in the System Preferences.

@alain01: I merged the latest core changes into my fork and I am looking at the updates to xSwatch4.

Since my version of xSwatch5 is based on the most recent version of Bootstrap/Bootswatch, and there are features there I need, I plan to continue my implementation there. I don't want to step on any toes here, so would it be OK if I looked at how you are using the core changes and see about incorporating the way you implemented a few things?

I will share my private repo once I get the next pass complete.

I have a preliminary port of the xSwatch4 theme to xSwatch5 for Xoops 2.5.11, based on Bootstrap/Bootswatch 5.1.1. It also adds a second menu option for a responsive, offcanvas sidebar menu in addition to the original navbar menu.

This is currently a private project on GitHub, and still needs some additional tweaks for items removed in Bootstrap 5.1.1.

Is there some place you would like me to put this so that it is visible within the Xoops community?

Thanks,
I will take another look at xmnews (and perhaps xmcontent) and see how easy it is to shut everything down so we end up with only basic templated pages that can be displayed with the MyMenus module.

Other than the basic text content, my modules are specifically tied to the various tables in our database which hold the information we want to display. I am afraid there is nothing generic in them that would be worth sharing. However, I will eventually have a few bug fixes to share once I finish with the upgrade project.

@alain01: Thank you very much for the information, especially about monxoops.fr using Xoops 2.5.11 Beta 2.

I appreciate your comments about using existing modules, and agree that for many websites that is the correct choice. I initially started our website with a version of TinyD, but we are not a portal, do not support submitted articles or comments/ratings/etc and it is currently not open to new users. The webmaster is the only content creator, so about 75% of the functionality of the impressive and well constructed public modules really just gets in my way. I found Xoops when I was looking for a way to organize and maintain the website for our small non-profit organization. Every time I upgrade to a new version of Xoops I review the public offerings, but the needs of our organization are not met by these modules at this time.

I want to thank everyone at Xoops for the time you put into the product. Over the years it has simplified my task as webmaster. And since I needed to develop my own specific functionality to maintain and display the data in our database, being able to easily create my own modules has been a significant benefit. I have enjoyed seeing the code base continue to improve in features, structure and OOP constructs. I look forward to the upcoming releases, will use the latest ModuleBuilder with Xoops 2.5.11 to refresh my modules, and see if my testing gives me enough confidence to upgrade the website to 2.5.11.

@Mamba: Thanks. I can take a look at porting the Docker version to Xoops 2.5.11. The PHPUnit tests also look interesting, although at this point porting them does not seem to make sense.

It would be nice to understand what release strategy to expect for this version in relation to Xoops 2.6.0. Both appear to be in active development, but there does not seem to be a current Roadmap for Xoops in general. Do you plan to release Xoops 2.5.11 in the relatively near future?

I ended up here because, for a variety of reasons, I need to upgrade my website to Bootstrap 5.1.1, and in that process I also need to upgrade my collection of modules that run my website. A few of these were developed in Xoops 2.3/2.4 and they are in need of refreshing on the admin side. I would rather not have to do this work multiple times and it seems like Xoops 2.5.11 might have some admin improvements over 2.5.10. Would appreciate some advice/guidance for what to use as my code base.

Thanks for your help.