[solved] Admin expand/contract/reorder functions not working

[krussell]

Hello,
I am running a local installation using XAMPP, and as per the title, the Admin console page management functions are not working correctly.
In Chrome and IE, expand, expand all, contract, contract all and re-order don't work when clicked. expand, expand all and contract all work if I click and then refresh the page. Contract does not work even after refreshing the page.

In Firefox, the behaviour is the same for expand, contract and re-order. However, expand all and contract all do work on Firefox when clicked.

I was originally running 1.10.2 and tried upgrading to 1.10.3 by copying the new files over and running the upgrade script. This did not fix the problem. All my modules appear to be up to date, and system verification does not report anything (apart from an advisory about E_DEPRECATED being enabled).

I also see the same problem on a site deployed to an external host (running 1.9.4.3) which makes me think this is a problem with my client side Javascript, but I can't work out why all 3 browsers have problems.

I've had a good trawl through the forums, and have discovered that this problem has come up several times over the years, but none of the suggestions in previous discussions seem to make a difference for me.
Can anyone suggest further action, please?
Thanks


CMS Install Information
CMS Version 1.10.3

Installed Modules
CMSMailer 2.0.2
CMSPrinting 1.0
FileManager 1.2.0
MenuManager 1.7.7
MicroTiny 1.1.1
ModuleManager 1.5.3
News 2.12.3
Search 1.7
ThemeManager 1.1.4
FormBuilder 0.7.1
Captcha 0.4.5

CMS Config Settings
php_memory_limit 128M
process_whole_template false
output_compression false
max_upload_size 128000000
default_upload_permission 664
url_rewriting mod_rewrite
page_extension /
query_var page
image_manipulation_prog GD
auto_alias_content true
locale
default_encoding utf8_general_ci
admin_encoding utf8_general_ci

PHP Information
Current PHP Version (phpversion) 5.3.8
md5 function (md5_function) On (True)
GD version (gd_version) 2
tempnam function (tempnam_function) On (True)
Magic quotes in runtime (magic_quotes_runtime) Off (False)
Is E_STRICT disabled in error_reporting (E_STRICT)
Is E_DEPRECATED disabled in error_reporting (E_DEPRECATED) E_DEPRECATED is enabled
PHP Effective Memory Limit (memory_limit) 128M
Maximum Execution Time (max_execution_time) 60
PHP output_buffering (output_buffering) 4096
PHP Safe Mode (safe_mode) Off (False)
File uploads (file_uploads) On (True)
Maximum Post Size (post_max_size) 10M
Maximum Upload Size (upload_max_filesize) 128M
Session Save Path (session_save_path) C:\dev\xampp\tmp (0777)
Sessions are allowed to use Cookies (session_use_cookies) On (True)
Basic XML (expat) support (xml_function) On (True)
Checking if the httpd process can create a file inside of a directory it created (create_dir_and_file)
PHP register_globals (register_globals) Off (False)
disable_functions in PHP (disable_functions)
PHP Open Basedir (open_basedir)
Test for remote URL (test_remote_url)
fsockopen: Connection ok!
fopen: Connection ok!
Test ini_set (check_ini_set) On (True)

Server Information
Server API (server_api) apache2handler
Server Database (server_db_type) mysql (mysql)
Server Database Version (server_db_version) 5.5.16
Server Software (server_software) apache/2.2.21 (win32) mod_ssl/2.2.21 openssl/1.0.0e php/5.3.8 mod_perl/2.0.4 perl/v5.10.1
Server Operating System (server_os) winnt 5.1 on i586

Permission Information
tmp C:\dev\xampp\htdocs\esca\tmp (0777)
templates_c C:\dev\xampp\htdocs\esca\tmp\templates_c (0777)
modules C:\dev\xampp\htdocs\esca\modules (0777)
File Creation Mask (umask) C:\dev\xampp\htdocs\esca\tmp\cache (0777)
config_file 0666
config.php writable. It is more safe if you change permission to read-only

[krussell]

After much head scratching and unsuccessful attempts to debug Javascript, I managed to solve this:

The solution was to change the encoding values in my config.php:

Original values:

Code: Select all

$config['default_encoding'] = 'utf8_general_ci';
$config['admin_encoding'] = 'utf8_general_ci';

Updated values:

Code: Select all

$config['default_encoding'] = 'utf-8';
$config['admin_encoding'] = 'utf-8';

Changing to utf-8 immediately fixed the problem with the admin console functionality.

The background to the encoding I was using is as follows: I had some problems with unusual international characters being displayed after I exported the database for a new website I was developing, and then reloaded it. One of the recommended solutions I found on the forum was to change the config.php encoding to match the database collation (i.e. utf8_general_ci in my case). This resolved the problem with the international characters, but appears to have stopped the admin console working.
Changing to utf-8 for the default encoding had the side effect of re-introducing a few odd characters again, but I was able to manually clean these up.

For my existing live website, I tried applying the same fix, but because this has a lot of content, the problem of the international characters was more significant. In this case, I have applied the following settings:

Code: Select all

$config['default_encoding'] = 'utf8_general_ci';
$config['admin_encoding'] = 'utf-8';

This seems to allow the admin console to work correctly while still displaying my website content without introducing unusual characters.