[Solved] News Articles Disappearing

[gsexton]

A customer has been using CMSMS 1.9.4.1. The server is running OpenSUSE 11.4 with the following software:

Apache: 2.2.17
MySql: 5.1.53
PHP: 5.3.5

He contacted me because he states that articles from the news section are disappearing.

He states:

I will post a review with the back end tool and everything will be fine for a few days or even a week and then all of the sudden the review(s) will disappear.

Additionally he adds:

At one point we tried to make the site URL Friendly but it did not work so we deleted the changes that were made. Looking back on now it it seems that the reviews started to disappear shortly after we tried to make that change. I can't think of anything else that happened.

but this may be extraneous.

The articles appear in the Content/News section. However, if you try to click on one of the news articles it takes you to a blank edit screen. I checked the database and found that for the articles with the problem, there are no entries in cms_module_news. For example, an article appears in the news list. Looking at the URL, the article id is 216. Looking at cms_module_news, there is no article with news_id=216. A similar article 219 is present in the db and works correctly.

I've upgraded the customer to 1.9.4.3. My question is this: Is the kind of corruption that I'm seeing related to the fix in 1.9.4.3?

If not, any ideas on what to look at?

Also, can someone point me to the appropriate table to clean up the bad entries? It looks like a table is keeping references to the cms_module_news table entries but I don't know the schema and I'm not seeing any obvious candidates.

[calguy1000]

At one point we tried to make the site URL Friendly but it did not work so we deleted the changes that were made. Looking back on now it it seems that the reviews started to disappear shortly after we tried to make that change. I can't think of anything else that happened.

Do a system verification to make sure that none of the 'changes' you made to the site are still there. If you have verification problems re-copy the effected files overtop until everything verifies properly.

[gsexton]

The original developer did not create a checksum file.

[gsexton]

I'm not the original developer, so I don't have access to the checksums.

[spcherub]

Any chance the database was restored from backup either intentionally by someone or by the hosting provider? If the tables were overwritten by an older backup, you could lose information as you have described.

Also I may be wrong, but you can use the checksum information that is available in the downloads section of the CMSMS site - find the one that is specific to the version you are using. Running a verification will allow you to compare your current installation with the original distribution.

-S

[gsexton]

I'm sure it's a scratch installation. The DB should have been created from scratch. If it had been restored, shouldn't it have been self-consistent?

I did a diff of a new 1.9.4.3 directory with my existing directory. The only difference is that one of the templates has some menu code uncommmented. In short, the PHP looks perfectly stock.

Anyhow, any ideas on where the related tables are so I can get the DB cleaned up?

[spcherub]

You are right about the DB being self-consistent if restored from a backup.

The tables related to News are the following:
cms_module_news
cms_module_news_categories
cms_module_news_categories_seq
cms_module_news_fielddefs
cms_module_news_fieldvals
cms_module_news_seq

Hope that helps.

-S

[gsexton]

Not really. If the record is showing in the News page list, and it doesn't exist in cms_module_news, then there's some other table that's referencing the article #. Otherwise, where would that display come from?

As I said above, I'm seeing articles on the News page with no corresponding entry in the cms_module_news table. So, something else has a pointer to it but the pointer's broken.

Does anyone understand the schema?

[spcherub]

AFAIK the tables are listed are the ones used by the News module. There should not be references to new articles in any other table, otherwise the module cannot be standalone (as it is today). The list of News articles comes from the table cms_module_news.

This may be a stretch but have you tried emptying your browser cache, logging back into the admin and see if the list of Articles in the Content > News section has changed?

Also make sure that the list of tables matches up with the list I posted earlier. This is make sure that the previous coder did not create his own version of the cms_module_news table, but did not update the underlying code for consistency.

-S

[gsexton]

OK, the problem is that the indexes on the table were corrupted.

I used the MySQL command: check table module_cms_news extended; to verify this, and when it reported the error I used the MySQL command "repair table module_cms_news;" to repair it.

The problem is the customer has rotten power and won't keep his UPS equipment working.

[spcherub]

Thanks for the update - please add [SOLVED] to the original posting subject line.

S