Thread

Greetings EE folk

An old client emailed me with a problem, the site is not loading it’s CSS file, and I get the White Screen of Death when attempting to login.

Site url: http://www.redwiremag.com/

I have updated their verison of EE from 1.6.9 to 1.7.3, no help.

The server is running PHP Version 5.2.17

I have added
$conf[‘theme_folder_url’] = ‘http://www.redwiremag.com/themes/’; 
$conf[‘theme_folder_path’] = ‘/home/redwire/redwiremag.com/themes/’; 
to the config file. No help.

Any suggestions?

White screen is sometimes a memory issue on the server. See what that has..

I’m on DreamHost, according to phpinfo it is the standard DreamHost 128M. Would this be a cause? The site has been running for 5 years no problem. Also, would a memory limit cause the site to not load the css file?

Not sure..but it was a place to start.

128M should be enough - my own site has half of that and is on 1x yet.

Have you contacted the host to see if they can provide any clues?

DreamHost don’t support EE installs. And there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong on the server end, I can access via SFTP, PHPinfo works etc.

I’ve tried all the config file hacks i could find via Google, nothing has helped.

Your .css file takes the following form:

<a href="http://www.redwiremag.com/site?css=redwire/redwire_css.v.1298715304">http://www.redwiremag.com/site?css=redwire/redwire_css.v.1298715304</a>

.css files should end in “.css”, or the browser won’t necessarily know what to do with the file. Also, make sure that the template type is set to “CSS Stylesheet” once you get access to the control panel.

As to the white screen of death, you can always turn on debugging to see what may be up. You can turn debugging on by going to the config.php file in your system folder and turning it on:

$conf['debug'] = "1";

There are some further debug tips in the EE 1.x docs that will help once you get into the CP. You also can turn off extensions in the config file, as extension conflicts can cause white screen:

$conf['allow_extensions'] = "n";

Your theme additions to config.php may just be confusing the situation. If you can get access to the CP, you can check the filepaths there.

Hope this helps to get you started,

-jim

The css link should work - it’s what EE outputs when the CSS is stored as an EE template.  Here is the link from my own site:

<a href="http://boyink.com/?css=stylesheets/screen.v.1298851800">http://boyink.com/?css=stylesheets/screen.v.1298851800"</a>

Boyink!, my sense is that because the file is not being parsed by the browser, it is not being given the proper MIME type from the server. .css files need to be sent by the server with a MIME type of ‘text/css’ not ‘text.html’.

If the template type is not set to CSS Stylesheet, then the MIME type could be ‘text/html’ or one of the other types. Depending on server config, if the file has a .css suffix, it might be delivered as a ‘text/css’ irregardless of template type. I was just suggesting one way of debugging the situation—take a variable out of the equation.

So under further investigation, I checked the content type at:

http://planetsvg.com/tools/mime.php

And came up with the following:

The file redwire_css.v.1298715304 at http://www.redwiremag.com/site?css=redwire/ has the file extension 1298715304 and content type text/html.

So clearly, either the template type is set wrong, or the server is setting the wrong content type. Fix this, and the .css file should render in the browser.

-jim

Thanks for your detective work, wildrock. My problem is how to to make any changes, as I cannot login to the CP either.

Bear in mind also that the setup worked flawlessly for the last 5 years.

So my original problems persist. Anyone?

Have you contacted the host? If it ran fine for that long then most likely the issue is something in their environment.

Or, possibly, the site had a spam registration issue that’s clogging the database. That would be something the host should be able to help you with.

Did you try to disable extensions? That cleared up quite a few white screens on cp logins for me on EE 1.x. Did you turn on debugging to see what errors you might get when you try to login?

And as Boyink! said, possibly you’ve got an environment change with your hosting service that might have mucked up stuff.

I’ve also had an install go haywire when the hosting directory gets compromised and some files added, deleted and/or modified by hackers. Use an ftp client and inspect the install. Grab a copy of the database and set the whole install up locally in MAMP, LAMP, or WAMP and see if you can wrestle it into submission.