After migrating a bunch of stuff from one (about to expire) server which ran lenny to a new one running squeeze, a friend’s blog, which is powered by Dotclear, appeared heavily broken. His posts appeared empty, though they were still there and the titles were right, but nothing else (no url, no author, no date, no content). After a little bit of investigation, I figured that the problem was that squeeze is running PHP 5.3, and that my friend’s version of Dotclear obviously didn’t support it. Checked the Dotclear website, found out that since PHP 5.3 support is planned for the upcoming Dotclear 2.2, the latest version (Dotclear 2.1.6 — which my friend already had, actually) did not support it. Checked the PHP website to find the 5.3 release date : 30 June 2009. Wow.
Looked a little deeper in the Dotclear forums, and I found a patch which is actually a workaround for the problem. This workaround has been available since the 20th of July, 2009, and the Dotclear developers won’t include it even in the 2.1 branch because it’s a workaround and not a real fix :
Le patch n’est pas appliqué parce que, tu le dis toi-même, c’est une rustine. Ça peut paraître vieux jeu, mais nous préférons garder un code propre et régler les problèmes correctement.
Which translates to “The patch hasn’t been applied because it’s only a workaround. It might sound overaged, but we’d rather keep a clean code and fix the problems correctly”. Well, it sounds like a great plan, which would be fine if it did not took them ages to produce that clean code :) (arguably, since the patch is easily available, my point might is pretty much void, but still, it’s not official — the average user grabbing the latest official release and installing it on their hosting which provides php 5.3 might easily get confused).
May 11th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Thank you, so much, for putting up this post. I would never have been able to track down a fix to get dotClear running on PHP 5.3x without it!
I spent the better part of today trying to track this problem down after upgrading my OS (ubuntu karmic=>lucid). After giving up trying to fix it on my own, I started searching on the web for an answer. That’s when I found your post.
The patch you referenced puts the sidebar back to what it should be, but it didn’t fix the problem of the data not being retrieved for the posts. Looking over the link you provided to the dotClear forum post, I found a later entry that had another patch (no small feat — I don’t speak French). This additional patch covers the patch you provided and a fix for the clearbricks dblayer file. Applying the patch for dblayer.php fixed my posts and now my blog appears to be working properly.
You can find the other patch at:
http://blog.famillecollet.com/public/Patches/blog.patch
-Al