After installing XOOPS on localhost and browsing to the default page, the menu with "Login" and "Main Menu" is show, but it is not active.

This makes it impossible to login even as administrator.

Trying to access through: http://localhost/xoops/admin.php just gives a blank page.

The installation sequence went fine and an admin user were entered and created. It exists in xoops_users table.

Have dropped the tables in the database, deleted all files and tried again a few times, but same result.

Javascript and cookies are enabled. Have tried IE and Mozilla, same result.

My installation details:

Website URL:
http://localhost/xoops

XOOPS Version:
XOOPS 2.0.14

XOOPS Theme:
default

XOOPS Template Set:
default

PHP Version:
4.3.10

MySQL Version:
4.1.9-max

Server Software:
Apache/1.3.33 (Win32) PHP/4.3.10

User's Browser:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

Anyone experienced something like this? Any ideas?

Login block missing - Solution found: MySQL Character set

As mentioned above, the problem was that the login block wasn't shown on the default page after a new installation of Xoops. Hence it wa impossible to login as administrator.

Searching for help I found information on how to enable different debugging features by modifying the database tables directly. See the following link (very useful!):

Turn on debug in MySQL tables

After enabling the PHP debug mode, the default screen showed the following warning:

Warning [Xoops]: Smarty error: unable to read resource: "db:system_block_login.html" in file class/smarty/Smarty.class.php line 1084

A search on this turned out more links to related problems. See the following link:

unable to read resource

Only header and footer after install

MySQL 4.1.7 utf8 problem

I checked that MySQL had write access to a tmp folder. That looked OK in my case.

The XOOPS database in my installation was set to use the utf-8 unicode collation.

To solve the problem, I dropped all the tables in the XOOPS database, changed the collation to latin1-danish, copied a fresh copy of all the XOOPS files to my webserver (still on localhost) and reinstalled Xoops.

That did it! The login block is now shown on the default page and I can log in as administrator.

There seems to be some discussion in the forum on whether this is related to certain versions of MySQL. One post suggests that the version I am running (MySQL 4.1.9-max) should not cause the problem. But in my case it did help to change the character set anyway.

Perhaps the experts of XOOPS can elaborate on the problem and possibly state suggestions for the character set in the otherwise excellent installation script and description of the installation.

I hope others may benefit from this experience. Even if it isn't exactly the same problem I can recommed to switch the debugging modes on and search on in forums and on Google for whatever error-message is shown.