Installing Rocket Theme -- White Screen

Installing Rocket Theme -- White Screen

by Layne Benofsky -
Number of replies: 5

Good day,

I'm attempting to install the Rocket theme, and am consistently getting a white screen when visiting the theme selection page after installing, updating moodle, and flushing all known caches.

My current moodle version is 2.3.2, and I've tried installing it on separate installs of 2.3.3 as well as 2.4 (a stab in the dark). I'm using the latest available version of Rocket, as well.

I've installed other contributed themes with no problems. Is there a specific error message I could check for, or has anyone else noticed this problem?

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In reply to Layne Benofsky

Re: Installing Rocket Theme -- White Screen

by Mary Evans -

I would remove Rocket theme from your Moodle server, and check that there is nothing wrong with your Moodle istall.

If after removing Rocket login to your site as Admin and go to Settings > Site Administration > Development > Debugging and enable the Developer debugging option at the top of that page. And then SAVE your settings.

Now negotiate to the Theme selector and try selecting some theme, just to test Moodle is working in that section.

If all is well. Then reload the Rocket theme, making sure it is named correctly. It should just be called rocket (lowercase letters).

Make sure too that it is in the moodle/theme/ directory like so...

../moodle/theme/rocket

If all that is correct, refresh your screen and you should get a Plugin Check page telling you that you need to install a new plugin, which in this case is the Rocket theme. Just read and follow instructions at that stage. Once installed and you recieve a "success" notice, you are free to choose this theme. If after this it all goes wrong, you should get a debugging error message.

Let me know how you get on.

Mary

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In reply to Mary Evans

Re: Installing Rocket Theme -- White Screen

by Layne Benofsky -

Thanks Mary,

I should have included that once installed before, the rocket theme would show up correctly in the plugins area, and moodle would perform updates to install it. Rocket was also listed in the themes menu and I was able to manage the configuration options for it. It was only when trying to load via theme selector that the WS would occur.

Removing rocket returned everything back to normal.

Now to the troubleshooting:

Removing rocket, confirming that moodle is fine, then re-uploading the theme results in this error when trying to switch:

"Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/wassc0/public_html/moodlecopy/theme/rocket/lib.php on line 1"

for some reason that file seems to be missing a ton of line breaks. The local copy I have looks fine, but after uploading with FTP it gets that way. Fixing that specific file finally lets the theme load, but there are other "undefined properties" errors that indicate other files in the rocket theme folders. Likely I'll have to fix these as well.

It's odd that it hasn't happened with other themes I've installed, but this now seems like a Filezilla[data type]/Lunarpages issue and not Rocket specifically.

Thanks for your pointers! smile

-Layne

 

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In reply to Layne Benofsky

Re: Installing Rocket Theme -- White Screen

by Mary Evans -

OK, you need to look through that theme, as Julian uses a MAC and sometimes, not always, a file may be saved in a MAC format. I convert all mine to UNIX/utf-8 which is normal practice in Moodle. I have also had problems with some undesirable characters creeping into the code to, perhaps as the end of a page where there is a lot of whitespace, this just needs deleating. I think it is something to do with Applescript, but I am not sure.

But is surprising the number of themes that always cause problems are those built with macs...sorry to say. sad

Mary

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In reply to Mary Evans

Re: Installing Rocket Theme -- White Screen

by Layne Benofsky -

Thanks Mary,

That makes total sense. I wound using binary mode to upload, and the theme seems to work fine (having some issues getting IE to work yet). Any thoughts on how to mass-convert files to the proper format short of opening and re-saving everything? ;D

This certainly explains why some themes worked fine / others not so much.

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In reply to Mary Evans

Re: Installing Rocket Theme -- White Screen

by Miriam Laidlaw -

I build all my themes on a Mac, but I always zip them up on my PC when I'm done because for some reason themes zipped on my Mac don't work properly when unzipped on a PC, but themes zipped on my PC will work fine when unzipped on Mac or PC.

Go figure.

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