Thursday, July 29, 2010

PHPList problem solved - send message page blank

Well I wasted over 2 hours fixing PHPList - again. A couple of days ago I upgraded from 2.10.10 to 2.10.12. Today I was in a hurry to get a newsletter out before the end of the 'east coast' day. I wrote it, then went to phplist and tried to 'send a message'. I got there and found all the tabs like content etc visible, but NO editor. Apparently there was a problem with the FCKEditor. I spent a long time going through the support forums - a long time. I looked at the .tgz backup and discovered that when I first installed PHPList I had to modify config.php and send_core.php - it had to be in those. I tried several things including switching editors in the config, but none worked.

I finally ran across a forum topic called "Send a message screen: nothing under the tabs" that gave me the solution and the real cause of the problem: "If you are running v2.10.11 or v2.10.12, one possible cause for this issue is that your PHP installation doesn't include the iconv module. You can check this by looking at your system details: lists/admin/?page=community"

I was missing the iconv module in the list of loaded php modules.

So apparently the solution is to comment out the calls that access iconv in send_core.php. I had messed with this file in 2.10.10 but I couldn't remember the changes I made. So I commented out the lines (using #) beginning at 1032 as follows:
# $utf8_subject = $subject;
# $utf8_from = $from;
# if (strcasecmp($GLOBALS['strCharSet'], 'utf-8') <> 0) {
# $utf8_subject = iconv($GLOBALS['strCharSet'],'UTF-8',$utf8_subject);
# $utf8_from = iconv($GLOBALS['strCharSet'],'UTF-8',$utf8_from);
# }

Problem solved. Now I've put this in the blog so the next time I upgrade PHPList, I'll remember. And this might also help someone else too.