Minify and Safe Skins

[Xenboy]

Hi,

I had a problem when upgrading IPB 2.3.6 to 3.0.4 that caused me several hours of work.

I upgraded successfully, but when going to the forum, all I saw was text, without any CSS or graphics. I downgraded and re-upgraded several times and tried numerous posted tricks without fixing the issue.

I finally gave up, downgraded one last time and put in a helpdesk ticket.

It turns out that my problem was caused because for some reason or another my server doesn't support the minify code you folks now enable by default. There were no knowledgebase items mentioning this issue and searches of the forum turned up nothing.

I recommend that the installer/upgrader notify the user if the installer is unable to determine if minify or regular skins are going to be supported by the hosting environment and allow the user to make a choice of the default setting during the installation process.

Something like this:

[ENABLE] [DISABLE] (If you enable Minify and then you find that all CSS and graphics are missing when you load your forum, please go to ACP->System Settings->CPU Saving and Optimization and change the setting Use Minify to no and save changes.)

The same sort of thing could be shown for the choice to use safe skins or not if the installer/upgrader cannot determine if standard skins will work or not. This would help reduce the number of tickets that people might put in.

We are unable to determine if your hosting environment supports Minify [Link to info about Minify]. Minify improves how the forum serves pages and [Edit description as appropriate.]. Would you like to enable Minify on your forum by default?

[Aller Internett]

I agree to this. Is it possible to turn minify off? For safety reasons we don't allow apache to write/create files on our servers, and because of that we've to seperate all writable folders to another server (with symlinks). Minify do not handle that very well :(

[Mark]

IPB does try to detect if Minify will work and disable it if not.
If for whatever reason the detection doesn't work you can disable it in the ACP - if you'd had contacted support from the start they would have recognised the problem straight away ;)

The main problem for Minify not working and IPB not being able to detect it is due to it's reliance on changing the include path - I did contact Minify a little while ago about this and they told me they would be changing that.

[Mat Barrie]

Oh yeah, and the version of Minify you ship carks it quite horribly if you add any extra CSS files (check out Forcize skins sometime - they actually require you to upgrade Minify when installing any of their skins!)

[Mark]

[quote name='Mat (FDNZ)' date='12 January 2010 - 11:10 AM' timestamp='1263294622' post='1898313']
Oh yeah, and the version of Minify you ship carks it quite horribly if you add any extra CSS files (check out Forcize skins sometime - they actually require you to upgrade Minify when installing any of their skins!)


Well that would be a bug which should be reported ;) I've never heard of or seen this issue.

[bfarber]

If there's an updated version of minify that works with IPB and fixes other issues elsewhere, I'm happy upgrading the version of minify we ship with.

[kofi]

Thanks xenboy for this thread.
Solve my troubles also.

@bfarber
the message that is prompted on the dashboard says that /cache/tmp needs to be writable.
if you then CHMOD777 the tmp folder. everything appears in lo-fi.
the problem is then that you need to disable minify in the CPU Saving & Optimization settings as well.
it is NOT automatically turned off.

lofi = CHMOD777 and setting "on"
normal = CHMOD 777 and setting "off"
normal = CHMOD 755 and setting "on"