Problems after upgrading to latest version

[tlw1999]

I upgraded my site this evening to the latest version and I'm having all kinds of issues which until they are resolved mean that I can't put the site back online. The site is my livelihood, so I'm fairly stressed out right now!

Firstly, the side column has gone and all of the blocks are now underneath. The column was there on the previous version I was running. Has this been changed and do I now need some kind of plug in if I want a sidebar?

Secondly, all of the articles I have in the pages app are returning an error message. I can see they are still there in the back end, but they won't load at the front end. The forum seems to be working just fine, albeit I've lost all of my customisations from the old skin I had and the option to customise it back does not seem to be there.

In short, it's a complete mess. Has anyone else experienced this and can anyone help, as apparently I can no longer put in support requests despite having an active licence. Not sure when that changed, but it's very disappointing as for me the great support was one of the main things that separated this software from vbulletin.

[teraßyte]

I assume you upgraded to version 4.7.3, but from which version did you upgrade?

 

About your issues:

1. Sounds like a theme issue, most likely some of your templates/css files didn't auto-update because they were edited.
2. Again, sounds like a theme issue also for this one. Most likely you need to update your templates to support new features. Or maybe some code for older features changed something and you need to make the same edit.

 

Have you tried checking if you have the same issues on a default, non-customized theme? Issue #1 should be fixed if you test with the default theme, but #2 probably still won't work until you update the templates (as I mentioned above).

[tlw1999]

Thanks for the reply.

I don't recall what version I upgraded from but I think maybe 4.3. It is quite a few years old I know that.

1. That's what I assumed, but even on the default theme for 4.7.3 I can't see any sidebar option. Everything that should be in there is underneath. I can click the little arrow on the left which allows editing of the page, but there is no sidebar there to drop anything in and I cannot find anywhere in the admin cp to change the setting so it shows two columns rather than one.

2. If it was a template issue would it not just show the page but with a messed up layout? As it currently stands it just returns the standard error message for page not found.

 

As mentioned in point 1, I have tried using just the default theme without any of my customisations but the issues remain.

[teraßyte]

Yeah, 4.3 is quite old, there have been a lot of changes since then:

1. Did you disable also all modifications? I forgot to mention this in my reply above.
2. Maybe, maybe not. Depending on what is broken, the page could be throwing some kind of PHP error or exception. If that is what's happening, the page won't load at all. For example the template might be calling a function that has been removed or changed in 4.7. Considering you upgraded from 4.3 it's certainly possible.

[tlw1999]

1. I think so. I've disabled all plug ins and used the default theme which has no modifications, but the sidebar isn't there. Is it still a default option on the new version, or does it require a template change to enable it?

2. That's a bit over my head to be honest. How would I check for that?

I appreciate your help, thanks.

[teraßyte]

1. Yes, it's still an option in the 4.7 version. I can at least take a quick look at your site and see what exactly is going on. What is your site's url? (I'm not IPS staff so I can't see the license tied to this topic/your account.)
2. Pages allows for a lot of customization so I can't really give you any specific indication on how to fix your templates without seeing them. If you send me a PM I can try taking a quick look for you and figure something out.

[Marc]

10 hours ago, tlw1999 said:

In short, it's a complete mess. Has anyone else experienced this and can anyone help, as apparently I can no longer put in support requests despite having an active licence. Not sure when that changed, but it's very disappointing as for me the great support was one of the main things that separated this software from vbulletin.

There seems to be some confusion here. A support request is exactly what you have submitted here. Its simply now done in another location. The support hasnt reduced in any way 🙂 

We would need to look further into this for you, however the access details on file appear to be incorrect or missing. Could you please update these details by visiting your client area, selecting the relevant purchase, then clicking "Review/Update Access Information" under the "Stored Access Information" section. 

We look forward to further assisting you. 

 

[Marc]

Taken a look at this for you, and you have 2 issues

Articles

The issue here is that you are using a custom database template "Supergrid Record Display" which is causing the page to break. Its likely this is not up to date and needs updating to the latest release of that set of plugins. I have set that to the standard unaltered version for now, just so that the articles load in the meantime.

Im not actually seeing the sidebar loading underneith anywhere. Please link me to which page that is on, if you are still seeing that issue

[tlw1999]

Thanks Mark, much appreciated.

The sidebar is not showing underneath currently as I've started the theme from scratch and removed all of the side blocks. One of the side blocks was breaking the layout so I'm going through them one by one to see which of them is causing the issue.

 

[Marc]

Ah, no problem. If it's a 3rd party item of course, let the author know so they can get that resolved

[tlw1999]

I'm still unable to read some articles. They load up in some categories (the paid content section works) but I still get the error message in others (everything that isn't in the paid section). I have disabled the supergrid plug in for now as I'm not sure there is an updated version, but presumably there are still some page customisations that are causing articles to not load?

[tlw1999]

There is an updated supergrid and I'm installing now.

[opentype]

16 minutes ago, tlw1999 said:

I have disabled the supergrid plug in for now

Just for clarity: deactivating the plugin just turns off the ability to alter the settings. The installed templates will still be used if they are assigned to Pages databases. 

[tlw1999]

8 minutes ago, opentype said:

Just for clarity: deactivating the plugin just turns off the ability to alter the settings. The installed templates will still be used if they are assigned to Pages databases. 

That makes sense because after I updated the plug in it told me it had made changes to the templates and gave me the option to go with the new version or the old. I went with the updated new templates and that did the trick, all articles showing now.

The layout and images aren't the way they are supposed to be yet but I'll look into that now. At least the pages are visible now so that's progress. Thanks.

[Marc]

Glad you got the pages themselves working now. Good luck on getting the layout how you want it to look 🙂 

[tlw1999]

I've been able to make some alterations but some of the editing options on the new theme aren't there. See the screenshots below. 

TLWDefault1 is my old theme from the outdated version which no longer works. You can see options for header, background picker, social icons, forum icons, countdown, global message, mega footer and misc

TLW_Default_New has none of those. So I currently do not have a header and I can't customise other things. I also need to make it fixed width but the option to do that is not in there either.

Also, when I click the wand for 'launches the editor in a new browser window' I get an error message and the editor does not open.

[Marc]

Those are items which were added by the theme that you installed, so you would need to get an updated version of that specific theme

[tlw1999]

It's several years ago but from what I remember, I thought I created that theme using the standard editor in the 4.3 version. If that's not the case then I must have either bought or downloaded a theme.

So just to get this straight, in the default theme settings there is no option to set the site as fixed width or to add a custom header?

If that's the case then I'll need to install another theme.

[tlw1999]

Actually Mark you're right of course, ignore the above, I did have a custom theme 🙈

Just going to buy the updated version of it as I think that will speed things along for me.

[Marc]

1 hour ago, tlw1999 said:

Actually Mark you're right of course, ignore the above, I did have a custom theme 🙈

Just going to buy the updated version of it as I think that will speed things along for me.

LOL no problem 🙂 

[tlw1999]

An update.

The forum side of things is ok and I'm getting there with the style customisations on the forum section, but the articles section looks a mess. If I use the supergrid plug in to display the images, the images are all tiled and look terrible. If I don't use that and go with the standard layout, the image appears on the left of the article but it's far too small and again, the page layout looks all wrong.

Plus the default side bar doesn't seem to work on the pages app anymore, which I assume means it needs a template edit but I wouldn't know where to look never mind what to change it to. That in turn is playing havoc with the articles layout as I'm used to a fixed width (also seemingly not an option in the new version?) and all of my images are tailored to that. So now the page is just too wide, especially with no side column.

The bigger worry I have though is that it seems to be running really slow and pages are sometimes hanging even though I'm the only one using the site. When there's a few hundred on there I'm not sure it will cope. I'll check the error logs to see if there's anything in there that might be causing it.

[Marc]

So, with the template side of things with pages, I see you are going through that with the designer there to get that sorted, so hopefully you can get that to where it needs to be. This will of cours also affect the sidebar on those pages, so would suggest you get that sorted first of all.

With the speed of things, before you do anything else, go to support in the top right of your admin CP, adn address the database items. These will certainly cause slowdown (the INNODB one specifically), and are server side items. You would need to contact your hosting company to correct the table types if you are unsure on how to do this

[tlw1999]

Thanks Marc, I'll get onto that next.

The issue with the images is not related to the supergrid plug in. I have removed the plug in and deleted all of the templates, but the images are still not displaying correctly. I assume there is a setting somewhere that will automatically convert the main image into a thumbnail, but I can't seem to locate where it is. 

So I am left with images that look like this:

 

Whatever is causing this is probably the same thing that was causing supergrid's display images to be tiled instead of just filling out the space. 

Where should I be looking to change the thumbnail setting?

 

 

[opentype]

That’s still not a stock template. Make sure to go into the database settings (and possibly also the category settings) to set all the templates back to standard options. In fact, the Listing Template in IPS doesn’t even support thumbnails. 

[Marc]

^ Trust this guy. Some say he lives on a diet consisting only of pages templates and that his favourite typeface is so perfect, it could be placed in the Tate Modern as a masterpeice