I’m in the middle of a server migration, and have about a dozen sites to move from one server to the other. I actual had to restart part of the process, as moving from a shared environment to a dedicated virtual setup requires far more knowledge and experience. Before, everything was easy-peesy, now, I actually have to know something about servers to keep up with maintenance, etc …
Thank, God for Google.
One of the first things I ran into were PHP errors.
As I said, “Thank God for Google.”
Yesterday, on Smashing Magazine, Rachel Andrew had a great post on PHP errors for designers.
This article is aimed at designers who are not PHP developers but need to install PHP scripts from time to time. Thus, the problems and error messages we will look at here are those you are most likely to encounter when installing scripts, rather than when writing PHP. The tips should help you work through other error messages and should at least help you give clear information to the script’s developer if you need to ask them for assistance.
She covers some really great stuff, that’s helpful for any server environment you may be designing on. Giving myself more control over my server, has made me a lot more mindful about what’s going on behind the scenes. I think designers can really benefit from having a basic understanding of how these things work, and even troubleshooting some basic issues, like PHP errors.
Whenever you install a PHP script, keep these 5 things outlined by Rachel Andrew:
- Learn how to access PHP errors on your server.
- Look at the error log to see what the error actually is.
- See if you can identify the source of the problem by looking at the initial error message or warning for the script.
- If the error seems to involve permissions or an incorrect database configuration, open a ticket with your hosting provider.
- If the script is the problem, then open a ticket with the developer, explaining what you have done and copying information from the error log. You will bring joy to their heart if you provide the actual error message rather than say you saw a blank page!
Now, time to put this knowledge to work!
[via Smashing Magazine | Image via Alex Proimos]
Raoul Snyman says
As a developer, I can tell you that the number one most frustrating thing is a user who can’t tell me the error message…
user: Hi, I got an error, please fix it.
me: Sure, what was the error? Was there an error message?
user: Yes, there was an error message.
me: Great! What did it say?
user: I don’t know, I didn’t read it.
me: …
You’ve given me exactly zero information. I cannot somehow deduce what your error was, and therefore how to fix it, unless you give me some information.
I get this sort of thing quite a lot on the OpenLP forums, people who tell us that an error happened, but they don’t tell us what they did and they don’t give us the error message. OpenLP even has a nice little error window that pops up when a serious error occurs so that you can e-mail the full error report (with some extra info that is quite valuable to us) to us with the click of a button.
Then of course you get the folks that tell us that they didn’t have Internet access when the error occurred, so they couldn’t e-mail it to us. Somehow they manage to miss the “save to file” button which is right next to the “send error report” button.
OK, I’m done with my rant.
Eric Dye says
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