Administrators FAQ (Oscailt 3)

Q1: How do I set up oscailt so that articles need to be approved before they appear?

If you want to make sure that all articles are approved before they appear on your site, you simply need to make sure that Auto Hide New Articles box is checked on configuration page for the publish module. Similarly, by checking Auto Hide New Comments you can make sure that only approved comments will appear on the site.

Q1.1 How do I approve submitted stories / comments

To approve submitted comments or stories there are a number of steps to carry out

1. Set Edit Content mode from the editor options link (on the bottom of left hand menu in the default install)
2. Once you have set Edit Content mode, you should see a box of options above each story/comment.
3. If you have the correct permissions, unhide should be one of the options, just click this link and the article / comment will be unhidden and will appear to the public.
4. If the hide link does not appear (the clip link should always appear), you do not have the correct permissions. You need to make sure that your user has an editorial role for the site-section in question. You can either create a new editorial role from the editroles.php page and give it the necessary permissions, or use an existing editorial role. Once you are happy that an appropriate role exists, edit the user in editeditors.php and assign the role to them.

Q2. How do I change the file upload limits?

File upload limits are set in two different places.

1. Firstly, and most importantly, they are set in the editconfiguration.php page. You can set limits for all sorts of things - number of attachments, different sizes for different types of files (video, audio, image), the maximum sizes for summaries and for stories. Any limits that are set on the main configuration page are absolute maximums for your oscailt installation, and they will override any other limits set elsewhere.
2. Each publish page can also have its own limits set. To change these go into the publish page configuration and edit the limits here too. If these limits are bigger than those specified in the main configuration page, they will be ignored.

Q2.1 Why did you make this so awkward?

Doing it like this allows you to set different upload limits for different types of publish pages. The main configuration value is the absolute maximum to ensure that in situations where different site sections on the same installation are controlled by different groups, the overall server administrator can still ensure that a maximum upper limit will be respected by all the publish pages on the site and one mistake by a section adminstrator won't be able to gobble all of the bandwidth of the server.

Administrators FAQ (Oscailt 2.04)

Q1: Why can't I get Oscailt to work on windows?

The most common reason for oscailt not working on windows is that the .htaccess file provided with Oscailt contains two php configuration override values. If you have PHP installed as an interpeter rather than as an Apache module then this causes an internal server error. To fix the problem delete or comment out the two php values from the .htaccess file or install php as an Apache module. If you are running on windows ME or 98, the cache file locking will not work and you will have to uncomment the lines in querycache.php that say "windows 98" beside them. But really why are you running on windows? Are you mad

Q2: Why do slashes keep appearing in comments and stories that I post?

This is because the php config option magic_quotes_gpc must have been enabled. Oscailt requires this to be off and sets this value in its .htaccess file. However for this setting to work "AllowOverrides" must be enabled for the directory Oscailt is installed under. To this you must edit, or ask your host provider to edit, Apache's httpd.conf file.

Q3: Why do long alphanumeric strings keep showing up in links on the site?

This is because the php config option session.use_trans_sid must have been enabled. Oscailt requires this to be off and sets this value in its .htaccess file. However for this setting to work "AllowOverrides" must be enabled for the directory Oscailt is installed under. To this you must edit, or ask your host provider to edit, Apache's httpd.conf file.

Q4: How do I setup a multi-lingual site?

Configure more than one language in the admin, and a language filter will automatically appear on all filters and the publish page. By default when a user visits the site they will see stories and features published in all languages. If however you enable the "mono lingual filter" in the admin, then when a user visits the site it will default to only showing stories in the language set in the users browser preferences.

This however is as far as Oscailt's language support goes at present. In future we hope to add a mechanism to allow easy localisation of the text of the website, with an extension of the "mono lingual filter" to include this text as well as the story text. We also hope to add a mechanism to associate two different language versions of the same story.

Q5: The other day my site gave weird database errors that went away a few minutes later. Whats Up?

Occasionally your database might glitch or exceed the max number of connections, especially if you host on a busy multi-hosted site. When this occurs Oscailt (since version 2.0) caches the error to prevent the site and database getting hammered by constantly querying the databases as would happen if it wasn't cached. Cached errors are retried every 5 minutes (configurable in systemconfig.php), so any temporary glitches will heal themselves within this time.

Q6: One part of my site is displaying gobbeldygook where a story or comment should be. Whats Up?

What occurs here is that two simultaneous requests try to cache the same query at the same time and corrupt the cache file. Since version 2.0 Oscailt has implemented file locking on cache files so this should not now occur. However its not beyond the realms of possibility that it could still happen for some other as yet unknown reason. If it does then edit or publish a story or comment or perform some other activity that clears the cache and the problem will resolve itself. If however the problem prevents access to the site, as would happen with a corrupt system config or category query, then manually ftp or telnet in to your site and delete all the contents of your query cache directory.

Q7: Hosting the attachments on another server.

Oscailt gives you the ability to host your media files (images, audio and video) on another server. To do this you simply change the URL Path in the administration configuration.

You will notice that if you look at the source of any page (with images) that the full URL is given rather than just the relative path, even when you have the attachments configured to be on the same server. In this way, via the configuration the path can be changed without having to change anything else.

Q8: Why does the Install script report an error.

An error could be reported for numerous reasons, but check that you have actually created the database first. Make sure this matches the value given to the variable $dbname in systemconfig.inc.

If there is a problem connecting to the database, make sure the value given to $dbhost in systemconfig.inc is the name of the server where the database resides. If it is the same machine as Oscailt, then the default value of 'localhost' should suffice.

Q9: Why will Oscailt not upload my image file(s).

Oscailt restricts the sizes of images files that can be uploaded. The default size is 35k which can be modified by the administrator. It also restricts at the same time the image width to 450 pixels. This is also configurable.

Q10: What's wrong, Oscailt is giving loads of warning messages.

If you have just installed Oscailt and you noticed it is giving lots of warning messages, then this is probably due to the PHP configuration for warning and error message reporting on the server. If it is set to high, it can result in lots of warnings been issued. These warnings will usually be something about undefined variables. For Windows installations, the php configuration can usually be found in the php.ini file.

Q11: Why does the newswire and gallery page die halfway through with no errors.

If this is happening its probably a problem with image thumbnails, because you don't have the GD image library installed. No errors are displayed because they have been suppressed for images. The GD library is usually installed by default with PHP but sometimes not. If this is the case goto www.php.net or google for "GD library" and find out how to install it. If for some reason you can't install it then goto the oscailt configuration page in edit mode and switch off newswire thumbnails. This will limit the problem to the gallery page and you can remove the link to this from the sidebar

-- VinnieC - 08 Aug 2005 copied in old faq, needs some revision

-- AnthonyG - 11 Dec 2006 added table of contents for easy navigation to individual questions