Contenido, OpenSuSE 10.1

handgestrickt installed a new webserver for one customer and our operating system choice was the new openSuSE 10.1. this distribution contains Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL 5. we were very curious whether our strongly patched WCMS Contenido 4.4.5 would work properly.

the export and import of the database are very easy. with phpMyAdmin we deleted the content of `con_active_sessions` by

DELETE FROM `con_active_session`;

and everything seemed to be fine. unfortunately the login did not work. with several

SELECT MD5('password');

we compared the `password` and `user_id` of several users and found they are right. after several REPAIRs we were totally helpless what to do. so we read the Contenido FAQ and found some enry about the setting register_long_arrays in the php.ini. the value of register_long_arrays must be "on". after we found this entry in our php.ini and set

register_long_arrays=on

the login worked fine.

the next problem was, that inside of Contenido under "articles" the categories disappeared. after we read through the file contenido/includes/include.con_str_overview.php we found that a LEFT JOIN in a MySQL-query near line 35 made trouble with MySQL 5. in the FAQ of a webhoster we found an entry mentioning these LEFT JOIN problems in MySQL 5. the reason: explicit and implicit JOIN-clauses in one query are not conforming to the SQL 2003-standard. we changed the lines in Contenido by detecting MySQL 5.

download the new include.con_str_overview.php for Contenido 4.4.5

the last thing making trouble was that some german characters that are part of ISO 8859-1 were shown broken in Contenido. it seemed that some UTF-8 conversion failed. we found a post in the Contenido forum mentioning this problem. PHP greater than 5.0.1 has some problems with the XML-parsing in Contenido. So the file contenido/classes/class.xml.php had to be changed.

download the new class.xml.php for Contenido 4.4.5

these patches were somehow like a refreshment for this good WCMS-system. all these changes are compatible to older servers also. in the next weeks handgestrickt will test the newest version of Contenido, which is 4.6.8 and try to apply all our patches, if necessary. we will write here about the results.

related:
openSuSE
Apache
PHP
MySQL
Contenido
phpMyAdmin
Contenido FAQ
FAQ (The Swiss Webhosting Company)
Contenido forum post about UTF-8-problems
Wikipedia:
WCMS
XML
SQL 2003
ISO 8859-1
UTF-8