Thread

I’m running EE 1.7.1 and have had my installation in place for several years.  This week, out of the blue, when I click “New Template” the browser churns for a while, then renders a solid white page.

I’ve haven’t recently installed any new modules, plugins, or extensions.

Has anyone seen this before, or do you have any advice on how to address this issue?

Hi, Wiley.

Let’s first of all have you check if you have enough PHP memory. One cause for a white page is the lack of PHP Memory.

Have you seen: EEWiki:// HowTo Determine Memory Limits

-and-

EEWiki:// HowTo Override Memory Limitations

I was able to up my memory_limit as it displays on the PHP Info page to 75M.  Still can’t create a new template.

I might should add that this installation uses MSM.  We’re currently managing 17 sites and have 671 total Templates.  There were 701 templates yesterday, so I deleted 30 deprecated/test templates to test whether we’d hit a “template max” limit of some sort.  The problem continued after deleting 30 templates. 

We can go through and actively remove more deprecated templates if you think that’d help…

Hi, Wiley, it certainly won’t hurt to get rid of any extra templates. Let’s also make sure you have a good backup before fiddling.

Did anything change recently on the server? Any new third party add-ons that may have been added to the mix? Can you test with Extensions globally disabled? (Not individually, disable all at once by clicking the big green button labeled Disable Extensions)

I’ve disabled extensions and the problem persisted.  We’ve recently updated to EE 1.7.1, and have been updating all 3rd party software.  I’ve also been deleting old, unused templates.

Any other suggestions?  Since the process ends in a white page, I’m not really sure how to debug it.

Hi Wiley,

Have there been any changes to your server recently? For example did you host upgrade php or reconfigure other settings?

Sean

Hi wiley,

After looking over this thread, it seems that a login is warranted. In the future, it would be best to make sure we have requested details in a particular thread. That keeps things from getting confused and allows us to provide the best support experience possible.

We’ll go in and have a look on this and update this thread when we have a resolution.

Thanks for you patience!

Sean:  I know there have been some updates to our server in recent months, but do not know the details.  I’ll contact the server staff to see if I can find out anything.  Aside from PHP version, do you have any suggestions of what updates to ask about specifically?

Dan:  My apologies.  *I* got my threads confused and submitted this one for server access.  *Then* I realized you’d asked for it for my other thread.  Sorry about that.  I’ll definitely wait until asked *in the correct thread* in the future.  Completely my bad.

Thank you for taking a look around. I appreciate your help!

Hey wiley,

No worries! Just don’t want to get the signals crossed. We have this in the login queue and will taking a look into it.

Cheers!

Just posting a note here to let onlookers know that we’re working with wiley privately on this for the time being. I’ll post an update back here once we have something to share!

Kevin & Dan, thanks for taking a look ‘under the hood.’ Unfortunately there’s no solution.  We’ve been working with our server staff, who’ve helped debug some, but we still haven’t found a solution.

One thought:  Our server staff have cracked down on files and directories with ‘777’ permissions.  Could there be specific files or directories that, when changed to 775, would prevent new Templates from being created?

We also have a test instance on the same server in a different directory that is still functioning properly.  We’re evaluating each extension, module, plugin, config, htaccess, and path file, looking for differences.  So far we haven’t found anything.  I’ll post here when we do.  In the meantime, let me know what you think about the 777/775 differences as they relate to New Templates.  Thanks!

wiley,

I know only what the User Guide says with regards to permissions on the templates directory, and that is 777. However, when the Template Manager saves out new template-groups/files the permissions are set to 755.

Keep us posted on what your testing bears out.

Thanks!

Dan, could you clarify:  “the permission [of what?] are set to 755.”  Thanks!

Hey wiley,

Sure thing. When you set up to have templates saved as files, you have to set the permissions on /system/expressionengine/templates to 777. Then when you save a particular template as a file using the Template manager, ExpressionEngine does a few things. If it doesn’t already exits, it creates a folder named after the short name of the site it belongs to. In non-MSM installations this is generally “default_site” so that you have /system/expressionengine/templates/default_site set to 755 ExpressionEngine then creates a folder for each template group named after the template-group name, for example, embeds.group and sets those to 755 as well.