Symphony.

I get a blank symphony/blueprints/datasources/ page, thus with no possibility to create datasource. Safari’s Web Inspector shows an Internal Server Error 500.

Permissions seem ok, I have disabled all but the following extensions (which I can not disable since they are used in sections):

• Image upload 1.2.1
• Markdown Text Formatter 1.14
• Subsection Manager 3.0beta2

System is Symphony 2.3 on a local MAMP installation using PHP 5.4.3.

Anyone any idea why this happens, oder anyone with similar experience? Thanks in advance!

What happens if you switch to PHP 5.3?

It might also be useful to know what the webserver error log is showing.

Thanks Nils! PHP 5.4 was the problem. Bad 5.4! :)

FYI, got the same problem with PHP 5.4.3 here. As I was working locally, just switched to PHP 5.3 as recommended and worked.

Just FYI, after an issue was logged re PHP 5.4 on github, it was resolved with no immediate plans to support 5.4. We are still maintaining 5.3 compatibility for a while.

5.4 can be a bit strict.

I've just experienced the same problem. I run PHP 5.4 locally for all my development work and all my sites. Having to downgrade to work with Symphony is a bit tedious. Has there been any progress on looking to support PHP 5.4 yet?

Usually you expect minimum requirements with at least PHP 5.2 required but I wouldn't have expected a maximum. Even at the bottom of this site it says "PHP 5.2 or above".

ijy, what does the PHP error log say?

@ijy - I think its something related to strictness. I believe someone mentioned an option somewhere where you set the error code to ignore notice errors and they managed to get it work.

As regards support for 5.4 from my knowledge this has started and as of the next version of Symphony will indeed support both 5.3 and 5.4 dropping support for 5.2 I am not sure if there is a public branch with the work so far.

Here's the output from the error log:

PHP Fatal error: Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed in /path/to/symphony/content/content.blueprintsdatasources.php on line 839

I've tried again turning off all notices, warnings, and errors but unfortunately still the same problem. It seems strange that it's only the datasources page that's affected.

Great news on the next version of Symphony supporting PHP 5.4. That will help to trim the codebase down a little which is a feature in itself as Allen mentioned at the Symposium. I'm happy to see the back of PHP 5.2 support.

If anyone knows of any way to get the datasources working on PHP 5.4 currently however then that would be very useful.

Thanks

Ian, have you checked out the integration branch of Symphony? https://github.com/symphonycms/symphony-2/tree/integration

This should fix the error you're having.

Note that if you plan to upgrade instead of a clean install, the updater itself isn't compatible with 5.4 yet, so you may need to stick with 5.3, update Symphony, then switch back to 5.4.

Hey Allen, ah I wasn't aware of the integration branch. So what does the integration branch represent? I see it is several commits ahead so is this more of the working development branch of Symphony? Does this eventually get pushed through to the master branch? Is it considered stable? Excuse my ignorance here, I'm fairly new to Symphony and just trying to catch up with working practices. :)

The master branch is the current released version of Symphony, and the integration branch is the working branch for the next release of Symphony. In this case, master = 2.3, integration = 2.3.1

OK got it. Is the integration branch stable enough to work from for production sites? If I'm pulling from that branch is there ever a need to switch back to master or just keep on that branch?

Usually when a branch is moved to Master - its what you should be using. Integration branch might from time to time have minor bugs in between builds. However most of the time it would already be thoroughly tested.

Before putting any integration branch updates to production it would be recommended that you test the system to make sure it is working as expected, so you don't get surprises.

OK I'll bare that in mind when working on my current project. It's a production site but I have time in development yet. I need to prototype first anyway.

If I were working from the Integration branch can I swap over to master on the same project? This would technically be rolling back a number of revisions but I'm just thinking about a deployment strategy.

That really depends if the next version release we're working on comes with an "update" requirement. Most of the time, when you apply a new version on top of your existing version, Symphony will ask you to run an "update". Most of the time, if we're talking about minor version updates, the updater doesn't do anything outside of changing your version number to the latest version.

However there could be times where the updater script comes with some changes it has to make, such as updating the DB structure, etc.

So if you've applied the integration branch to your current copy of Symphony, ran the update, AND the updater had made changes to your database, then rolling back would to the "master" version would require you to retrace the steps that the updater did and reverse those changes.

If you ever want to find out what kind of changes an updater would make, take a look at the update scripts in: install/migrations/