Blank Front Page with Liquid Theme
  • Hi all.  

    I just installed Newscoop.  While my install is working fine on most themes, I am unable to get the liquid theme to do anything.  When I switch an issue to liquid theme and then try to view the front page, I am only loading a blank page.  Inspecting the source code also reveals that no data at all is being downloaded.

    My initial thought was that, perhaps the jQuery/Masonry libraries were not properly installed, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  

    Any ideas?
  • 12 Comments sorted by
  • Hi,

    problem can be that you forget  legacy plugins and this stepss:

    How to install old legacy plugins?:

    • Download the fixed package of legacy plugins from here.
    • Extract archive and copy it to newscoop/plugins/ directory.
    • Go to newscoop root folder (../newscoop/) and execute php composer.phar dump-autoload —-optimize
    • Clear the cache folder: sudo rm -rf cache/*
  • Hi Sebastian.  Thank you for your response.  

    It seems that the legacy plugins are there.   I find them in /var/lib/newscoop/plugins.   Even so, I downloaded from the link and tried to follow the instructions.    I was able to extract the plugins, but I am running into a bit of trouble on the third step.   

    When I try to follow step three, I get this:

    ubuntu@ip-172-31-33-99:/var/lib/newscoop$ sudo php composer.phar dump-autoload —-optimize
     [RuntimeException]
    Too many arguments.  
    dump-autoload [-o|--optimize] [--no-dev]
    ubuntu@ip-172-31-33-99:/var/lib/newscoop$ 
    Post edited by Kevin Hurley at 2015-01-14 12:45:12
  • I am suspicious that this might not, however, be the problem with the liquid theme.   When I checked, those plugins seemed to already be installed.

    Interestingly, the other themes are working just fine.  But, when I switch an issue to liquid theme, the site will not load so much as an HTML header.  I wonder if there could be something wrong with the way the webserver is configured?   But, if so, why would it serve up the other themes just fine?

    Thanks for your consideration and thought on the matter.

    Kevin

    Post edited by Kevin Hurley at 2015-01-14 13:41:30
  • After poking around a bit more, I convinced myself that the PHP version might be the problem.   I downgraded from 5.5.9 to 5.4, reinstalled newscoop and tried again.

    Still no luck.    

    Loading the page, with the liquid theme, is still blank.  no html.  nothing.  
  • A quick look at the apache shows only one line of information for a page load in the liquid theme:
    localhost:80 XXX.13.45.198 - - [14/Jan/2015:16:57:03 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 290 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36"

    There error log reveals nothing.
    Post edited by Kevin Hurley at 2015-01-14 17:00:53
  • Next thought:  Perhaps there was not enough system memory for php to be doing what it needed to do.  I imaged the install onto a larger machine with 4gb ram.  Still the same problem.  Liquid not loading.  Only a blank page.

  • After re-installing everything on Debian (as opposed to Ubuntu, which I was using before), I am still having the same problem.  The liquid theme only feeds back a blank page.  

    Here is my thought:   I think the theme that I downloaded was not the most current one from GitHub.   One of the only constants in my trials, was the source file for the liquid theme.   For some reason, the version that I download from GitHub is not properly importing.   When I try to import the zip from GitHub, Newscoop responds with an "import successful" notification.  However, when the dialog box disappears, the theme is not listed as one of the available themes.  

    Any thoughts?

  • I realized that I was not using the Nescoop 4.3.  I've now upgraded and was able to install the liquid theme.  I've created a publication and some articles, however, the front page is still blank.   

    Ideas?

  • I have followed the steps to install the legacy plugins.   All commands execute without error, however, I don't see the plugins listed in the plugins dropdown of the admin interface.  I imagine I should.   

    Also interesting, none of the themes are now loading.  I am only getting a blank screen on all of the publicly viewable pages.   Admin interface is working fine.  


  • Just one quick thought, did you reload image renditions (definition of renditions comes from theme.xml) - sometimes that can cause errors. Reloading renditions is on configure/image rendering
    --
    Ljuba Rankovic
    Senior Front End Developer, Sourcefabric
    ljuba.rankovic@sourcefabric.org

    http://www.sourcefabric.org
    http://www.twitter.com/Sourcefabric
  • First thing to check is reloading renditions in configure->image rendering. It this does not help try to replace everything in front.tpl with some dummy text. If that works it means that there is something wrong with Liquid theme. I would then try to delete parts of front.tpl to see which code breaks the page.
    Remember that You have to enable API for section views with "infinite loading".
  • Thank you, Ikuja and Tomasz for your reply.   

    I did not reload image renditions (before now).  doing so, does not seem to change the problem.  

    As it is now, Liquid theme is not the only problem.  None of the themes are loading a front page, section page, issue page, or article.  Everything that is on the public end is blank.  The admin section is running just fine.  I don't suspect the front.tpl to be the problem when the same symptom is appearing on the entire side (publis side).  

    I also realize that I have not provided you with proper info about the install.  (it was a late night of investigation) 


    Running on Amazon EC2 server w/ 4GB 
    Debian Wheezy
    Newscoop 4.3  (installed via manual installation guide)
    connected to MySQL with 'root'

    So, in a nutshell, none of the themes are spitting out any information.   However, after installation, there seemed to be a brief moment (perhaps the first page load) where something did display (only a border in the header).  Every page load after that (on the public side) is blank.  

    Fav Icon is loading....

    54.68.224.180 for now, if you would like to check it out.  

    Thanks again for your great work and great product.  I am so excited to begin developing.  

    Best.