BenV's notes

One of our customers has a website with some custom-made CMS made in php.
The customer asked us to fix some things, but since I hate touching pleuris-hoeren-product code, especially when the original coder is prutser and has never heard of templates (which is really weird, considering this is a CMS… maybe it’s just lazyness… then again, the echo "blabla\"escaping\"quotes\"is\"so\"much\"fun\n\n\n50 more lines here"; style really doesn’t show much intelligence…)

Anyway, I figured I might as well move the entire thing to an open CMS project that I’ve heard some good things about and already implements everything and more that the customer could ever want. That’s CmsMadeSimple.

Converting the old website to the new one was trivially easy. Copy/paste the stylesheet (first mistake), edit the basic template with a menu section, create the pages (copy/paste, copy/paste).
After fixing the html errors that were in the source the page looked like a pixel-perfect copy of the original.
Except for the places where the HTML errors were fixed that is. (the center class now actually worked for instance)

However, when adding the print links I ran into an interesting issue.
Adding print links is also a trivial thing, simply put {print} somewhere in the template, and possibly add some options to show an image instead of a text link etc.
However, the links were kinda broken, they gave empty pages. So I figured “duh, the print template still needs to be fixed”. However, as soon as I added the {content} tag to the template, I got a nice internal server error. WTF.

Checking the logs I could only find nice reports of this:

php-cgi[2530]: segfault at bf04b3f0 ip 08348d32 sp bf04b3f4 error 6 in php-cgi[8048000+6e9000]
php-cgi[2564]: segfault at bf639750 ip 08348d32 sp bf639754 error 6 in php-cgi[8048000+6e9000]
php-cgi[2804]: segfault at bf200230 ip 08348d32 sp bf200234 error 6 in php-cgi[8048000+6e9000]
php-cgi[2896]: segfault at bf00cbb0 ip 08348d32 sp bf00cbb4 error 6 in php-cgi[8048000+6e9000]

Well… .I expect nothing less from php. Pleuris-hoere-product. But how the heck… just because I added content to the print page? What’s so special about that?

After digging around (enabling logs etc) and enabling fopen for php (which I had disabled for security), I noticed this:

[Wed Jul 14 12:22:29 2010] [error] [client 123.611.204.37] PHP Warning: file_get_contents(http://some-site/oncmsmadesimple/) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required\r, referer: http://some-site/oncmsmadesimple/
[Wed Jul 14 12:22:29 2010] [error] [client 123.611.204.37] in /www/vhosts/some-site/cmsmadesimple/modules/Printing/Printing.module.php on line 96, referer: http://some-site/oncmsmadesimple/


AHA!. Apparently the printing module fetches the content (or at least, tries to) from the webserver, fails, and then segfaults php. Excellent code guys!
The reason for the failing is obvious from the logs here, I require authentication for the website since this is a test location that shouldn’t be public. Quick fix, allow the server to skip the login (vhost config):


AuthType Basic
AuthName "Testsite CmsMadeSimple"
AuthUserFile /lala/passwordfile
Require valid-user
Allow from 127.0.0.1
Allow from 192.168.1.1
Satisfy Any



Problem solved. (Hint Printing Module: render your own shit, don’t cheat with fopen/curl)

Oh yeah: CmsMadeSimple rocks for these simple websites where your customer wants to “change some texts and add a picture”. If they can handle word, you can make them handle this (but show them how!).
Give them permissions to add pages and nothing else, write a decent template for them, done.

Here we are today, trying to do a very simple thing. Print a stupid little PDF document so our customers can pay their bills.
Easy huh? Especially after the previous cups drama?

So we fire up xpdf on the document, hit the print icon, lpr, GO!
*time passes*
Mhm, what is it now?
*check http://localhost:631*
Nope, no document there, seems like it was handled by the printer.
*check cups error_log*
Heaps of garbage there.

Remember that we had this issue left in our previous cups story? Something about PDF printing causing issues? (continue reading…)

We tried to do something that seems fairly simple. “Print out these tickets for HAR2009“, where we went last weekend and had a great time 🙂
The tickets were delivered to me by mail in PDF format. Sounds easy huh?
Note that this story was written the day before we went there, just not finished, so timing might be a bit awkward. Here are the details. (continue reading…)