Joomla module works locally but displays nothing when hosted

Question

Hello, I am new to joomla and I need to work on a joomla website for a school project. I modified an existing module to make it display featured projects and it does that flawlessly when I test the site locally. However, when I uploaded my files to the hosted copy of the website, the module will load but does not display anything. It just loads the title and the area for the php output but there is nothing returned by the script. Why would this be happening? I have joomla mostly figured out but I'm stumped when it comes to this problem.

As far as I can tell, all files related to this module have been copied over successfully and it is setup properly in the module manager. I turned on debugging mode on the hosted copy and got this message when trying to load another page with this module on it:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/content/s/r/s/srsgdmnet/html/components/com_rbids/rbids.html.php on line 1

I looked at the file and I don't have a clue what it's talking about. Line one is just "<?php" which is fine. Is it just saying line 1 but actually referring to a problem elsewhere? This file is part of a reverse auctions component that my module interacts with. I didn't modify the code in that file with the exception of using a regular expression (search using "\n\s*(\n)", replace with "\n") to remove excessive amounts of whitespace via the replace command in Netbeans. This cut roughly 3200 lines from the file, making it much easier to navigate. I assume this did not alter anything in terms of code because it still works fine when used locally.

I modified my local configuration.php file to use the same database as the hosted copy to see if it was a database issue but it still worked fine so that rules that out. The php.ini files are the same on both copies with the exception of the local one having the Zend stuff commented out so I could use Xdebug (made this change after the problem occurred in an attempt to locate it). I have stepped through the code with Xdebug and haven't been able to track the issue down so I'm thinking it's a configuration problem.

My local copy also does not load certain modules (main menu, for one) and I can't navigate to some of the other pages, not sure if that is related. The code is the same for both copies yet each one has different results. Am I skipping vital steps for migrating the code?

I am using Joomla version 1.5.9. Please help!

Answer 1

Your question is ten days old, so perhaps you solved it already. But my suggestion would be to check the code for forward and back slashes. It might be that the code uses \ which works locally but fails on your server where it needs /. In Joomla extensions you can replace folder separations by DS, in the way of 'folder'.DS.'subfolder' instead of 'folder/subfolder'. The API will replace the DS by \ or / as appropriate.

However, the parse error you get indicates that something is missing in the syntax of your code. You will just have to go over it with a magnifyer glass. Sometimes when the error refers to the first line the impact of something missing works its way back to the beginning of the file. It could be a ' or ; or something small like that.

Regardless of your module, you should update to Joomla version 1.5.15 which at present is the latest version. you are 6 security releases behind schedule!

Answer 2

The group I have been working with has come to the conclusion that somehow Netbeans is messing up some of the files when we edit and save them. We tested by taking files from our server, opening and then saving in Netbeans, and then uploading back to the server. Sometimes this produced files that apparently did not have any newlines in them and led to php errors, breaking components or even taking down the whole site.

Our current workaround for this is to just take the files this happens to and use notepad++ to make our changes before uploading. It's a very strange issue and caused us a lot of grief. Hopefully the Netbeans team fixes this in future releases.

Thank you all for your attempts to help me solve this problem.