STRANGE PROBLEM - navigation / pages dissappear

[nmorgan]

Hello,

I'm running ver. 1.9.4.2 at a host that my client wanted to use Eleven2 - i've never run into this before but once last week and now today - suddenly the site navigation doesn't load - the site is still there but the navigation disappears.

The site was up and running stable for several months. My clients makes very simple changes via the admin.

Suddenly the navigation went blank. And it seems the database is not serving the navigation. I called the host and they said it was nothing on their end so we rolled the site back.

Now it is happening again.

My guess is that it is a host thing but wanted to shout out to the CMSMS community to see if anyone had ever encountered such a thing.

Calguy told me to upgrade but at the moment the host is looking at a support ticket so I'll need to hold on that. Also wanted me to give more information which I'm not sure what all that would be so I'm going to paste in the modules used in case that will help. But if I need to wait until I upgrade to ask this question than never mind.

http://segretofinishes.com/

an older version of the site exists at our development server at hostgator:
http://216.172.164.80/~segreto/

so you can see roughly what is supposed to be delivered.

I have my host looking into it but last week they claimed that it was nothing on their end and we rolled the site back a few days. I don't want this to keep happening but just wanted to see if anyone else has any clue what this could be

Oh, and when you log into the admin - you don't see any pages

but oddly you can dial up a direct page like:
http://segretofinishes.com/about.html and see that at least some data is being delivered just not the home page.

VERY STRANGE!!!


Installed Modules

CMSMailer

2.0.1

FileManager

1.1.0

MenuManager

1.7.6

ModuleManager

1.4.2

News

2.11.3

nuSOAP

1.0.2

Printing

1.1.2

Search

1.6.10

ThemeManager

1.1.4

TinyMCE

2.8.4

Gallery

1.4.4

FCKeditorX

1.1.0

CGExtensions

1.27.1

OwnersManual

1.0.2

Thanks in advance if you have any thoughts on this or if anything similar has happened to you.

[calguy1000]

CMSMS 1.9.4.2 is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported version of CMSMS, currently 1.10.2

[janaf]

I can not see any difference between the two.

So I would guess it is a caching problem, try to turn off CMSMS page caching, clear the CMSMS cache and also the browser cache if this does not help. Site Admin / Global Settings - Advanced.

And upgrade

You do have a separate site, so you can do a test upgrade there..

[nmorgan]

Thank you! I will do all of that.

Both links are now working because my host rolled back to yesterday for me.

Earlier today on the main site (not the development server) all of the top navigation was invisible and you could not advance to any of the pages no would the 3 big graphic links work.

[nmorgan]

"Allow browser to cache pages" was unchecked initially and I'm keeping that unchecked.

The line beneath that that says Browser Cache expiry period was set to 60 and I changed that to 0.

I then cleared the cache.

I'm going to backup and upgrade tonight.

I'm hoping you're right that this is a caching problem but seeing as how I don't think I had it set up to allow caching I'm not sure about that. Would having it set to 60 cause the site navigation to dissappear.

Also the site had been running fine since Aug 31 of this year and all of a sudden navigation - and ability to click home page links disappeared so I was worried that I had been hacked.

When I update the software that won't necessarily clean the site if I have been hacked would it?


thank you for your help.

[calguy1000]

Also it could be a timezone problem (though this is a strange symptom of that problem)... make sure your timezone is set correctly (to the servers timezone) in the config.php.

[nmorgan]

Thanks. I checked with my server and they said CST

somy config files is this:

# Timezone setting
# PHP 5.3 requires that timezones be set at the server level.
# This variable can be used to set your sites timezone.
# Valid values for this variable can be found at:
# http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
# If this field is empty, no timezone will be set
# US/Central
$config['timezone'] = '';

It looks to me as if is CST by default -- isn't that what the #US/Central notation means?

or do I need to change that last line to: $config['timezone'] = 'CST';

Again, thanks thanks thanks -

[janaf]

Still problems with the navigation? Try disable / enable MenuManager (AC=>Extentions) to see if it helps. Just guessing, but I have seen this solve things on other modules. Also check if the problem is on one browser or several. Could rule out/confirm local cashing problems.

[nmorgan]

Now the site is working. It's just that I'm worried it will happen again since I don't understand what went wrong to begin with.

The problem it that after an edit to the site - it appears the problem recurs. I didn't solve the problem last time - just rolled the site back - once a change was made again it the issue reappeared.

I will do the disable - enable - menu manager. Thanks.

Also, I'm not sure if site cache is set right now.

Allow browser to cache pages: was unchecked all along and is still unchecked.

Browser cache expiry period was at 60 (before the incidents) and now I have changed that to 0

Remove cache files that were older than number of days: was always at 0.

So the only thing I have changed is the expiry period so far.

Also: the time zone setting - not sure about it either. My host said the time zone was CST. I'm not sure if the default in the config is CST or not. See my previous post.

Thanks for your help.

It is hard to troubleshoot when it is working now but I can't have the incident keep occurring - as it is in affect a site down situation.

My host did not see anything in the logs that would indicate a problem.

thanks!

[janaf]

The problem it that after an edit to the site - it appears the problem recurs

I have seen similar problems on one site (there all the the css is goes) and clearing all the cashes solves this. I do not have enough info to file a bug report.

Not a very good solution for my customer and I do not know what the other browsers see either.

As calguy wrote, it could be a time setting issue, if the cache timeouts behave in some unexpected way on updating a page, due to different date / time formats / settings.

These are in the config.php:

Code: Select all

$config['timezone'] = '';
$config['locale'] = '';

I had the timezone set but not the locale. It may influence some time setting but I am just guessing....

I just set the locale (non-english) to see if it helps. But I guess that is not your problem, with the english / us lolcale.

[nmorgan]

re: MenuManager
I was reading the menu manager information and they have a noncache setting.

What Janaf said made me think..... and I wanted to add that when the navigation is disappeared I Viewed source and there was nothing in the menu section. It wasn't like there was code there but the css wasn't loading. That section was blank.

Also (before the roll back - when the navigation had disappeared) in the Admin area of the site there were no pages listed as if the site had no pages - no even an index. Also other graphic links that were not part of the Menu Manager also did not work.

Code: Select all

Caching

This module has the capability to cache its output into static files to reduce memory requirements and sql queries, and to improve frontend performance. This provides all the advantages of static menus without the inconvenience involved when creating or editing pages.

Each menu template can be marked as "Cachable". When a cachable menu template is used on a content page that is cachable, any cached menu output that is available for thsi page will be used. The nocache parameter on the menu tag can be used to completely disable caching.

All cached menu files are erased when a content item is added, edited, or deleted... and also when a menu template is added/edited or deleted.
Parameters

    * (optional) lang="en_US" - Parameter is used to specify what language to use for display on the frontend. Not all modules support or need this.
    * (optional) collapse="1" - Turn on (set to 1) to have the menu hide items not related to the current selected page.
    * (optional) loadprops="0" - Use this parameter when NOT using advanced properties in your menu manager template. This parameter will disable the loading of all content properties for each node (such as extra1, image, thumbnail, etc). This will dramatically decrease the number of queries required to build a menu, and increase memory requirements, but will remove the possibility for much more advanced menus
    * (optional) items="contact,home" - Use this item to select a list of pages that this menu should display. The value should be a list of page aliases separated with commas.
    * (optional) number_of_levels="1" - This setting will only allow the menu to only display a certain number of levels deep.
    * (optional) show_all="0" - This option will cause the menu to show all nodes even if they are set to not show in the menu. It will still not display inactive pages however.
    * (optional) show_root_siblings="1" - This option only becomes useful if start_element or start_page are used. It basically will display the siblings along side of the selected start_page/element.
    * (optional) start_level="2" - This option will have the menu only display items starting a the given level. An easy example would be if you had one menu on the page with number_of_levels='1'. Then as a second menu, you have start_level='2'. Now, your second menu will show items based on what is selected in the first menu.
    * (optional) start_element="1.2" - Starts the menu displaying at the given start_element and showing that element and it's children only. Takes a hierarchy position (e.g. 5.1.2).
    * (optional) start_page="home" - Starts the menu displaying at the given start_page and showing that element and it's children only. Takes a page alias.
    * (optional) template="simple_navigation.tpl" - The template to use for displaying the menu. Templates will come from the database templates unless the template name ends with .tpl, in which case it will come from a file in the MenuManager templates directory (defaults to simple_navigation.tpl)
    * (optional) excludeprefix="" - Exclude all items (and their children) who's page alias matches one of the specified (comma separated) prefixes. This parameter must not be used in conjunction with the includeprefix parameter.
    * (optional) includeprefix="" - Include only those items who's page alias matches one of the specified (comma separated) prefixes. This parameter cannot be combined with the excludeprefix parameter.
    * (optional) childrenof="" - This option will have the menu only display items that are descendants of the selected page id or alias. i.e: {menu childrenof=$page_alias} will only display the children of the current page.
    * (optional) nocache="" - Disable any caching of this call to the menu. This parameter, if set to any positive value will override any settings in the content object and the menu template.

When the problem was occurring - in the View Source there was nothing in the Menu Area - it wasn't like it was there but just the css was messing it up.

If the problem returns I will enable/disable the menu manager but it will be a big problem if this has to be done after each site edit.

The only other things that have changed since the site launch is I added some code in the footer for the facebook like buttons and I think I added OwnersManual which needed CGExtensions to run. I also added News module at some point but wasn't using that so just uninstalled that.

I'm just trying to figure out how a stable site that launched 8/31 and was running fine all of the sudden has problems. Then I remember that on just one of the computer in their texas office there were having problems editing. But the other computer worked and I had no problem either. Weird stuff!!

[Dr.CSS]

Yes set your TZ in the config, if host says server is in CST then add that to the config file...

$config['timezone'] = 'CST';

[nmorgan]

wonder why the config file has a note above that says:

# US/Central

can it be stated either way?

I'll go with yours:

$config['timezone'] = 'CST';

Thanks!

[Dr.CSS]

If that doesn't work try the US/Central, either way your problem has to do with the time zone...

[nmorgan]

Y'all are not gonna believe this.

My client (in texas) just recreated the problem by simply saving and uploading something on the site with her computer and sure enough site went down.

So I cleared the cache and all came back.

So I tried to make a change on my computer (ms) and it is all ok. We are all in the same time zone.

I've got a call into her asking her what browser she is using and if there is a local computer setting that has time zone in it to change it to CDT but I didn't think the local computer settings had anything to do with logging into the site.

Before we had this issue and another computer in their office was able to make changes. At that time it wasn't taking the site down they just were not able to make changes. Computer A would but computer B wouldn't. Now Computer A is taking down the site. Not sure about computer B but I'm going to ask.

I just had to share. Too weird.