Warning if you use cpanel (filemanager) to edit your php files

[Andrew Chai]

After several frustrating days of trying to get my php-nuke 6.5 to work correctly I thought I'd share something I accidentally ran across.

If you use the filemanager within cpanel to edit your php files you should know that filemanager automatically adds two blank lines to the end of the file when you save. Now normally this may not seem to be a big deal but when you start doing includes and requires than it becomes a big headache. If you include a php file with a blank line before or after the php block this blank line gets rendered as output. This means that you can no longer manipulate any of the headers since output has already been generated. I kept getting the dreaded Cannot Modify Headers error because of a stray blank line. I ended up having to re-edit all the php files that I have edited in filemanager to remove the blank lines and ftp them back which magically cleared up all my problems.

This may not be news to some of you php veterans but hopefully this will save someone the same headache.

Supposedly you can avoid this behaviour if you turn on output buffering. Now I'm off to figure out why phpnuke's output buffering code doesn't work.

Andrew Chai

[jason]

CP file manager...ewwww...

--Jason

[Vin DSL]

Originally posted by jason
CP file manager...ewwww...

I run a Nuke 6.5 site on JagPC (Neutron). Here's the URL:

http://www.Lenon.com

I started with 5.5, then went to 5.6, then 6.0, and now 6.5. I did this in the space of about a month. I guess I'm used to the installation drill now, but I don't think PHP-Nuke is any harder to set than any other PHP software, or CGI/Perl for that matter. It's a steep learning curve at first, like everything else, and prone to be buggy because it's a leading edge product, but well worth the effort IMHO.

I use a proggy called Winsyntax 2.0 to edit PHP files. It's simple, but does the job. It's better than, say, WordPad/NotePad, and definitely better than using the control panel. Here's the URL:

http://www.winsyntax.com/

I use WinSCP 2.3.0 to upload/download the files between my workstation and the web server. It is better than FTP and MUCH more secure. Here's the URL:

http://winscp.vse.cz/eng/

Truth be known, when I'm working on my site, I use WinSCP instead of Explorer and WS-FTP, and edit the files using Winsyntax instead of WordPad and NotePad, so I never have to leave WinSCP.

Anyway, my recommendation is to stick it out with PHP-Nuke 6.5, use WinSCP 2.3.0 to transfer the files, and Winsyntax 2.0 to edit them.

EDIT: BTW, these proggies are all freeware ...