Symphony.

Hi!

I am having a problem with Symphony 2.4. I think it is so trivial it couldn't be a "true" bug, so I decided to ask about it first.

So the problem is that the Section editor (Blueprints / Sections on the Admin panel, editing any section) is slightly messed up by some underlying JavaScript. In any dropdown selection (such as "Placement", "Text formatter") I can not select entries (in a deterministic way it would either ignore my clicks or select different entries).

I replicated this on a fresh Symphony 2.4 install as well, so I could rule out anything gone bad while updating my site.

The browser I use is Firefox (31.0, and 32.0), running on Linux. The server is Apache 2.2.22-13+deb7u3, PHP is 5.4.4-14+deb7u14, MySQL is 5.5.38-0+wheezy1 on my box (on my host where it behaves the same they have PHP 5.3, not checked much more yet).

Turning JavaScript off I could do the selections, however then I can not save the section (with some trickery I can get it through, though, so I can see Symphony appropriately saving the state after I manage to get it through the interface).

I think this is something so trivial it shouldn't be left in the stable build, so it may be something in my system. Could anyone confirm?

(A related question: Markdown with HTML Purifier is really supposed to be broken? Selecting that, and attempting to edit any field being formatted by it brings up a big nasty error. I wanted to get around this running into the problem above. I also replicated this on a fresh 2.4 install)

Definitely sounds like something at your end - I've been using 2.4 for a few months now on several projects and haven't seen any issues like this. Hopefully someone on Linux can test and confirm that it's not specific to your setup - but I'm assuming there isn't a great deal of difference between Firefox builds across platforms.

What Linux distro are you using? That'll likely be important.

What's the 'nasty error' you're seeing with the markdown formatted text area?

Are you using any plugins in Firefox that could be interfering with javascript?

I gathered some additional information.

First and foremost, I downloaded Opera, and in it the Sections panel works without problems. My Linux is Debian Wheezy, 64 bits. The Firefox I have is a 64 bits version, as I checked, the IceWeasel coming with the distro is also 64 bits, exposing the same problem irrespective of whether I have any plugin enabled or not.

For the other Markdown problem I rather attach the error report page as below. The textarea is selected to be formatted with Markdown (With HTML Purifier). However if this is a "real" bug, I guess I should better go to the Issue Tracker with it (I have a GitHub account, so no problem). EDIT: Did a search in the Issue Tracker, and found it: https://github.com/symphonycms/symphony-2/issues/2094

EDIT: Did some additional tests. I downloaded a fresh 32 bit and a fresh 64 bit Firefox, both exposed the same buggy behavior on my system. Could anyone report back how this browser behaves on other systems? (Other Linux users? On Windows?)

Glad you found an existing issue for the markdown error! Hopefully you saw the fix available from brendo.

I'll leave the other stuff to those with access to Linux builds.

Of course! I patched up my production site with the fix to get things right now, next stable version will come with it anyway I guess.

For the Firefox issue as a last resort I ditched all it's config. files (temporarily) to see what happens with an absolute clear install. Problem persists. Then what I never thought would work, I downloaded the Windows version to install and start it up in Wine (I have no Windows). To my surprise it works, that is Firefox installs and starts without any hiccups! And the problem is not observable! So it seems only the Linux versions of Firefox are affected.

Anyone could confirm? (Any other Linux user running Firefox)

I use Kubuntu, and I do not have any problem with dropdown selections on Firefox, including "Placement" and "Text Formatter".

In recent and latest Firefoxes/Iceweasels in Ubuntu and Crunchbang I haven't had that problem.

This is ridiculous. It seems to be a WindowMaker specific bug (I use that window manager).

I dusted off an old PC with Debian Squeeze 32 bits, on that I couldn't experience the problem.

Then on my production system I added a test user, so everything fresh. Logged in (with system default window manager, don't caring at first, that's Gnome), and with Iceweasel I experienced that the problem does not reproduce. So what. Logout, tried WindowMaker, and yes, the still clean Iceweasel produces the bug.

So apparently the version of WindowMaker coming with Debian Wheezy (but not that coming with the one release older Squeeze) seems to carry some arcane bug (remember, as above, it also needs JavaScript enabled...) which would manifest in crapping up my Sections panel in Firefox / Iceweasel. Just great (I hate Gnome, even if this means I have to switch to Opera for altering sections).

Wow.

Just to complete this story.

I posted on the WindowMaker issue tracker, and they reported they can't reproduce the behaviour. The situation annoyed me still, so I researched after how I can test window managers without destroying my system, which (no wonder if it is Linux) turned out to be possible. To put it short, it is possible to run any WM from user mode, and even that to get just the bare X surface, all the better, at least in the case of WindowManager, it is even capable of exiting into bare X.

I soon found why they might have not been able to reproduce the behaviour: the newest WindowMaker, compiled from source, does not produce it. I also dug up the version supplied with my distro, that compiled from source reproduced it. So I guess it is pretty much found: It was some bug in WindowMaker which was fixed since, but not in the current stable Debian.

An interesting side discovery is that browsers (both Opera and Firefox variants) run all well under bare X, however the dropdown lists become unusable (in both; no dropdown for clicking them, regardless of whether JavaScript is On or Off). Somehow those are apparently provided by the window manager which is weird since just about everything works just fine in bare X otherwise (including other applications).

The moral of the story... Well, don't have applications in your startup script when you are testing window managers. Seriously, I don't know how many applications are already open in this mess, I see something like two rows of icons down there, and in the restarts WindowMaker even loses icons for some running apps... The good part this was definitely not a Symphony bug after all :)

Thanks a lot for the debugging (and the good news for Symphony)!