Stefan Helander

Footer widgets not displaying when using Cherry Framework 4 for WordPress

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To make the footer widgets visible when using the Cherry Framework 4 template for WordPress:

  • Under Cherry in the backend menu, select Static Area Builder
  • In the Footer Top section, click on the Footer Sidebars
  • In the .col-xs-*, .col-sm-*, .col-md-* and .col-lg-* select the desired widget size for each screen size (i.e. select anyting else than “none” to make the footer widgets visible)
  • Click Save statics (bottom right of the screen)
Stefan Helander

Ispconfig3 php5-fpm Error 500 Internal server error

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When trying to change a client website on a Ispconfig3 host from Fast-CGI to PHP-FPM the page just gave Error 500 Internal server error. Investigating the site error log showed lines like:

[Sat Oct 22 10:39:56 2016] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] (2)No such file or directory: FastCGI: failed to connect to server "/var/www/clients/client6/web447/cgi-bin/php5-fcgi-*-80-domain.xx": connect() failed
[Sat Oct 22 10:39:56 2016] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server "/var/www/clients/client6/web447/cgi-bin/php5-fcgi-*-80-domain.xx"

Checking the status of PHP-FPM by the command:

service php5-fpm status

gave the result “not running”.

Investigating the PHP-log file, /var/log/php5-fpm.log, displayed lines like:

[22-Oct-2016 10:34:53] ERROR: [pool web405] cannot get uid for user 'web405'
[22-Oct-2016 10:34:53] ERROR: FPM initialization failed

However, the site widh id 405 and user web405 did no longer exist on the server and has been left there by Ispconfig3 for unknown reasons.

The solution was to manually remove the file /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/web405.conf file and then:

service php5-fpm restart
service apache2 restart
Stefan Helander

Joomla problem after upgrading to 3.6.3 – Error decoding JSON data: object property name separator ‘:’ expected the bad data is: {“”}

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After upgrading to Joomla 3.6.3 I got this error message when trying to login to administrator:

Error decoding JSON data: object property name separator ':' expected the bad data is: {""}

Solution was found here using the method suggested by Brent Laminack.

You need to issue the following SQL command using for example phpmyadmin:

update TABLEPREFIX_modules set params = '' where params like '%{""}%';

Note that you must replace TABLEPREFIX above with the prefix your Joomla installation is using.

Stefan Helander

Magento 2.1 setup readiness check fails – PHP version is empty

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If the Magento 2.1 setup readiness check fails with an error message displaying nothing for the PHP version, similar to this:

PHP Version Check
Your PHP version is . The required PHP version is . Hide detail

You might also see error messages about open basedir restrictions, similar to this:

Cannot determine required PHP extensions: Warning: is_dir(): open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/etc/pki/tls/certs) is not within the allowed path(s):

The reason can be that Magento is by default expecting SSL/TLS. If not used, the above can occur.

Solution:

Edit the composer.json file and add a line to the config section so it looks like this:

 "config": {
  "use-include-path": true,
  "disable-tls": true
 },

I.e. add the line “disable-tls”: true (and don’t forget to add a “,” last on the preceding line). Now restart the setup.

Stefan Helander

osTicket email attachments missing in ticket

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Incoming email to osTicket, but attached files from the email message are missing in the ticket.

Make sure attachements are enabled for tickets in osTicket.

  1. Login as osTicket administrator
  2. If you are not on the administrative control panel, switch to it by clicking Administrative control panel (top right menu)
  3. Settings -> Tickets
  4. Scroll down to the attached files section and click on the Config button
  5. Make sure the Allow attached material is ticked and optionally select the file types to accept. Also check the allowed file size so it is sufficient.
  6. Click Save
Stefan Helander

Import visit card file contacts (VCF) to Windows 7, 8 and 10 Contacts

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In Windows 7. 8 or 10 Contacts there is only a possibility to import contacts in CSV format. If you have your contacts in  VCF files you need to use Windows Live mail program in order to import them.

First of all, if you have your contacts in many different VCF files it can be convenient to combine them into one single file. That way you can import one file instead of thousands. This post describes how to combine them.

  1. Download Windows Live mail here.
  2. Install Windows Live mail on your computer.
  3. Open Windows Live mail and configure your mail account.
  4. Click on Contacts and when asked, log in to your Windows Live account (i.e. the same Microsoft account used to log in to your computer running Windows 7, 8 or 10)
  5. Click Import, select Visit card (.vcf)
  6. Select your VCF file and import it.

 

Stefan Helander

osTicket ‘Access denied’ after upgrade to 1.9.14

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After uploading/copying the files from the upload directory to a osTicket installation in order to upgrade it to osTicket 1.9.14, I got the error message ‘Access denied’ when trying to login as administrator to finalize the upgrade. Deleting the osTicket session cookie did not help either.

It turned out that the problem was that all files in the distribution ZIP-file had file permission ‘000’ causing the trouble. A ls -l looked like this:

---------- 1 webNNN clientX 5162 jun 11 18:22 login.php
---------- 1 webNNN clientX 980 jun 11 18:22 logo.php
---------- 1 webNNN clientX 714 jun 11 18:22 logout.php
---------- 1 webNNN clientX 1584 jun 11 18:22 main.inc.php
---------- 1 webNNN clientX 930 jun 11 18:22 offline.php
---------- 1 webNNN clientX 2830 jun 11 18:22 open.php

A simple fix was needed. Make sure you are in the upload folder of the unpacked distribution zip when you do this:

chmod 644 `find . -type f -print`

Stefan Helander

What is eating my disc and fontworker is eating my CPU (in OSX)?

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A Mac suddenly displayed the message “Your startup disk is almost full” to the user. However, there should be plenty of space left on the disk. Something was eating up the disk rapidly.

Some investigation using Activity Monitor showed that a process called fontworker was also eating a large chunk of the CPU as well. In the Terminal I entered the command:

cd /
sudo du -sm *

to find out what folder was using most space (the command requires admin privileges so it will prompt you for the administrator password). I then entered:

cd the-folder-name
sudo du -sm *

to find out what was using most space in the largest folder (replaced by “the-folder-name” in the example above). I repead the steps until I found a large file containing the fonts database occupying about 85 GB which is way more than normal.

It turned out the fonts cache had become corrupt.

To rebuild the font cache was easy. By simply restarting the computer into Safe mode and then reboot it back into normal mode, the font cache was cleared and rebuilt, solving both the disc and CPU problem.

Problem with the fonts sometimes occurs after OSX reinstall which in this particular case had been performed about a week ago.

Stefan Helander

How to add search by CTRL-F in Joomla codemirror editor

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When working with template files like css in Joomla the codemirror editor is used. However, a great annoyance is that it is not possible to use the browser search (CTRL-F) to find code. When your css becomes large this can be really annoying.

There is a search addon available for codemirror however. This is how you add it to your codemirror editor in Joomla:

Download these files:

https://codemirror.net/addon/search/search.js
https://codemirror.net/addon/search/searchcursor.js

Upload the files into your Joomla and place them in the <Joomla root>/media/editors/codemirror/lib directory.

Edit the file <Joomla root>/plugins/editors/codemirror/layouts/editors/codemirror/init.php

Find the two lines (around line 19-20) looking like this:

JHtml::_('script', $basePath . 'lib/codemirror' . $extJS);
JHtml::_('script', $basePath . 'lib/addons' . $extJS);

After them, add the following lines:

JHtml::_('script', $basePath . 'lib/search.js');
JHtml::_('script', $basePath . 'lib/searchcursor.js');

Save the file and enjoy searching in codemirror using the commands described in the search addons page (like CTRL-F etc)!

Note: A future possible system update will however overwrite the changes made in init.php.

 

Solution by Stefan Helander, HelTech Communication AB.