I just found the funniest error I personally ever encountered with CMSmadesimple.
Storytime:
My customer called me that his page answers with a 404. She admitted being in the content manager clicking around (its just construction and I encouraged her to feel free to click around everywhere to get used to the UI and all … in my eyes CMSms is almost bullet proof so why not?) and with that she killed the page. "Impossible!" I said and got online.
I looked around and couldn't find anything weired or wrong. I set debug mode, changed global settings, deleted the htaccess, messed with PHP settings, cleared the cache, reset all pages to one template, batch-processed all pages to HTTPS forth and back, refreshed the installation, … no joy. Some random page with an address would deliver fine - just the root URL would not, neither with or without the 'index.php'.
"The file you are looking for does not exist." — Strange.
Now I went with her through the steps she had done — and now I see it.
How to:
Use your starting page, 'home' or however you call it. Go into the editor, set the page to be a parent in the "content type". Save.
What happened? Now CMSms has no default page anymore, while a content-type parent has no content and hence cannot be a page or work as starting page.
Actually totally logic. I wouldn't had done one thing different if I designed it.
Is it a bug?
I'd say no.
However, meanwhile I need to click twice »yes, I am absolutely sure I really want to delete this unrecoverable«.
So, t h e r e f o r e one would think that such a major change also would come with some kind of warning - or maybe even full deny of the backend, stating that this change that would result in killing the page.
I don't want to throw any stones here, please don't get me wrong. In the end I was rolling over the floor laughing because this outcome was actually clear if one thought about it; of course for a newbie like my customer not - and me entering the room after it happened … I did not see in the content listing that there is no default page set. Just didn't see it. All marks green, no one red or such - good to go, right?
I can imagine that programming a solution for this may be a lot bigger than it seems; checking if the currently edited page is the default page, blocking content-type changes - or giving a warning after checking first if - or whatever else … probably a lot steps to code.
So in the end I just wanted to share my story in case one googled this (I did and didn't find my case - dunno if I was too stupid or too quick here) and maybe give you guys a laughter too, like I just had. I guess the most people working with CMSms are coders, maybe a few designers like me and otherwise trained editors that wouldn't click around randomly to see what happens. It was my fault actually leaving her alone.
Thanks for all your work making the magic of CMSms happen - have a great day!
