I've really goofed things up. need help from all you smart folks.

before i started the upgrade, i backed up the SQL database and made a copy of the root directory of the XOOPS 207x installation.

then, i turned off the site and copied the files from the 207x to 2092 upgrade packet into the root directory

that failed -- a fatal error -- so i decided to roll back to the old files. i copied all the old files back into the directory and the site is now broken -- basically everything returns a "no input file specified" error.

so i've really goofed up my wife's blog. what i'd really like to do is rebuild the site on a newer (more secure) version of Xoops, because i think that site has been hacked.

a) is there a way to do that, using the backup of the 207x database?

b) is there a way to get past the "no input file specified" problem and at least get her back on the air?

i'm in pretty deep yogurt here -- any help would be much appreciated.

m

hello Wonder.

looking at your site, you have not given the "anonymous" user group permission to access the Forum part of your site.

go to the Administration Menu,
go to System Admin,
go to Groups,
go to Modify, anonymous users

once you're there, give those anonymous users permission to access the NewBB (Forum) module.

you *also* need to set the cache time to 0 -- both of these together are what solved the problem for me.

if you don't want to give anonymous users read-only permissions to view your Forums, the RSS feed is a security hole because it will let people read your forums without actually entering them. so, although it is ugly, it's actually a Good Thing that RSS doesn't work if you haven't given people permission to look at your Forums area.

it might be a nice enhancement to code a little error trap that is a little bit of an explanation -- something like "RSS is disabled - to enable RSS, contact system administrator and ask that anonymous users be given access to NewBB" or some such.

Never mind...

sorry, I should have read the support site about my question.

Went to the Admin page, went into the Modules area, clicked on the "update module" icon in the "action" column and now the change has taken place.

thanks again!

Thanks!!

I am a complete nitwit when it comes to PHP and Xoops. Once I've made the change to the file, do I have to do something to get the change to be effective? I know that what you're suggesting will work, because I wrote a little tiny PHP file with just that one line in it, and the date comes back perfect.

But I changed the file in XOOPS and it didn't make a difference to backend.php. I have a feeling I need to do something to make the system suck in the new copy of the /includes/functions.php file, but I'm not sure what to do to "bounce" XOOPS to get it to do that...

Hi gang,

I'm trying to get the RSS feed that comes from backend.php to pass the validation tests at Feed Validator

The validator is complaining about the format of the date feeds coming from backend. Here's my backend.php URL

http://www.sexandpodcasting.com/backend.php

(be not concerned about the URL, it's definitely not about sex, and work-safe -- long story)

The problem is that the dates in the XML from my site looks like this;

Mon, 9 May 2005 11:19:28 Central Daylight Time

While the validator wants it to look like this any of these options;

http://www.feedvalidator.org/docs/error/InvalidRFC2822Date.html

The thing it seems to be complaining about is that the timezone is spelled out ("Central Daylight Time") rather than abbreviated ("CDT").

This error probably isn't a really big deal for most folks, but it breaks the date-processing in some feeds that are downstream from me because the feed coming from my site (backend.php) doesn't adhere to the RFC-822 standard.

Is there a setting I can twiddle to get that fixed?

thanks,

m

Here's a little scoop on how I do podcasting with a XOOPS site. It's a workaround until the XOOPS software can support podcasting directly, but it works pretty well.

First, here's a link to the site -- Sex and Podcasting (be not put off by the name, it's a play on the title of a community-radio handbook written by a friend of mine -- this is definitely a "work safe" site).

Note the link to an RSS feed down on the lower left? That's an RSS feed that is actually generated by FeedBurner rather than the standard XOOPS BACKEND.PHP module.

Feedburner has a lot of cool features, but the one that's relevant to podcasting (which has been going on since November 2004 by the way) is that it will automatically build the enclosure statement in the RSS feed.

Another tool that folks may want to take a look at is BlogTorrant which is a nice-looking PHP-based gizmo to incorporate BitTorrant seeds into your podcast site to address the "holy cow, I just got really popular and my site's getting hammered" problem. I just came across this one this morning, so I haven't had time to incorporate it into my site yet.

As long as I have your attention, let me lobby for some other blogging functionality additions to the main XOOPS portfolio --
"Pings" (which alert the aggregators that your blog has changed) and "Trackbacks" (which let other blogs know when you've linked to their content) come to mind. It would be great to kinda get XOOPS up to snuff in the whole blogging area -- it's a good solid platform, but it's not up to "excellent" when it comes to blogging.

Ah! I've been watching this thread for months, waiting for this answer.

The combination of adding Anonymous permissions *and* setting the RSS cache time to zero is what finally did the trick for me.

Thanks for figuring this out!!

Hm. Methinks it's time for those of us with the problem to chime in with what platform we're running on.

I'll start. My problem child is;

OS - Win2003 (all patched up)

MySQL - 4.0.20a

PhP - 4.3.7

XOOPS - 2.0 (I think...)

What got me started on this was the "paths" problem installing phpWiki -- which happens in WinXX environments but not in Linux/Unix...

Just a quick note to confirm this -- I've got the same behavior.

Tried changine the UTF-encoding flag to "no" and the problem persists.

It's great to have the RSS link on every page. It'll be tempting for folks to click it, so having it work would be a Good Thing.