Moodle in English: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Markus Knierim - Friday, March 5, 2004, 11:32 PM

I just updated my moodle installation to the current beta version, which seems to cause some odd problems with displaying the pages in IE 6.0 and Opera 7.23 (Netscape 7.1 and Mozilla 1.4 seem to work fine). This is what happens:

Sometimes (!) the CSS doesn't get applied, so that all text is in Times (instead of Verdana or Arial, as it should be), borders are not drawn, background textures are missing, etc. -- However, when I reload the page with ctrl+reload, the CSS does get through.
The footer is missing on all main course pages. (The page ends with the last week of the course.) -- Even refreshing the page with ctrl-reload doesn't make a difference.

This problem applies to all themes, self-created ones as well as the standard and logo themes that come with moodle.

I'm using the nightly version of March 4.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Any help will be appreciated

Markus

Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Markus Knierim - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 2:07 AM

Hi again,

I noticed that some other Moodlers who have their site hosted with 1&1 Germany, which hosts also my moodle site, have reported problems with 1.2b as well (see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=5459).

Is it possible, then, that some odd detail in the server configuration might cause the problems that I mentioned in my previous posting? If yes, what kinds of changes were made to Moodle between 1.2 development (build 2003101700) -- this version worked just perfectly for me! -- and 1.2b (build 2004022400, nightly of March 3/4) that may cause this behavior? I'm just guessing, but were there any changes related to caching the style sheets?

Maybe someone can help me with this... thoughtful

Markus

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by David Delgado - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 4:23 AM

You may consider asking what changes your hosting provider may have done in their configuration and software in that time slice, since some people at the same provider report similar problems. Perhaps it is the changes in your provider what makes Moodle fail, and not the changes in Moodle versions. Ask your support service for any posible recent changes.

Hope this helps.

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Ray Lawrence - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 4:39 AM

I had a short spell with 1&1 last year. Despite the convincing website they were carp (anagram). I dumped them and moved to Total Choice Hosting. TCH are cheap and have provided me with superb customer service. I've not had the problems you have notified.

Time to move?

Ray

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Markus Knierim - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 5:09 AM

Hm, I think it would be absolutely coincidental if I ugraded to Moodle 1.2b on March 4, 5pm, and 1&1 changed their server configuration at the very same time, wouldn't it? As a matter of fact, the older 1.2dev is still working ok.

Also, since the new beta works for me in Netscape and Mozilla (Win), the source of this problem does seem to lie with Moodle that has "developed" some strange caching interaction (as Richard Page calls further below) with IE. What do you think? Am I totally off-track here?

Markus

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by W Page - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 3:36 AM

Hi!

I have also experienced problem after upgrade from dev v1.2 to v1.2b. I am using the free promotional package which 1and1.com promoted in the US and Canada during January. I documented my problem as well at,

"500" Error when attempting to create a quiz or assignment after upgrade to v1.2b
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=5785

The support at 1and1.com "stinks" although we were promised fast e-mail support for these sites prior to signing up.

I cannot figure out why these "500" errors are occuring. They have rendered the site usless. Yet I installed v1.2b on a pay webhost and it runs well.

Given what you indicate I just think it is some "crazy" way they have the servers configured.

WP1

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Markus Knierim - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 4:55 AM

Hi WP1!

Yes, I saw your earlier comments regarding 1and1.com, even though I think that the servers/webhosting packages for the promotional offer in the US and Canada are configured somewhat differently from their "regular" "German" packages (like mine) wink

Actually, I haven't got any "500" errors so far, and I haven't had any problems creating quizzes after the upgrade either. My problems seem rather minor in comparison to yours, I guess -- yet, I wouldn't say "lucky me" mixed

I'm really curious to hear if any moodler has an idea of what the reason for this mess with the themes might be...

Cheers,
Markus

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Peter Sanders - Monday, March 22, 2004, 5:59 PM

We are using 1and 1 and we have upgraded to the latest Moodle 1.2

Now we are having the same problems, 500 errors. I know there are topics elsewhere on this site about this.

In fact, if you create an assignment, get the error then look at the course, you can see the assignment is there but the details are missing. Go into it to edit, save and it all comes back and works properly.

This is not very satisfactory at all. Does anyone know the cause of this, or a fix?

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Richard Page - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 4:16 AM

I have had problem with 1.2dev. I installed it on two different servers running M$ IIS ver 5, and have similar results from both installations. The CSS does not seem to be always interpreted by the browser. The browser is IE6 and IE5.5.

On one client machine, it toggles back and forth between default times roman and the styles specified. Other machines are more intermittent.

I wonder if it is a caching interaction with M$ software?

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Markus Knierim - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 6:02 AM

As it looks -- to me, at least -- the browser and the browser version play some role here. I just looked at my 1.2beta site using IE 5.0, and surprise, surprise: everything looks just fine!

Ok, let's see how far we've got: My best guess at the moment is that something related to CSS handling in Moodle changed from 1.2dev (Dec) to 1.2beta, which causes this odd caching behavior (at least) in IE 5.5, IE 6.0, and Opera 7.23. And since not everyone using these browsers and 1.2beta seems to experience this problem, it might also be connected to some detail in the configuration of my webhosting package.

I'm certainly not a professional PHP programmer nor am I very much familiar with configuring servers, but I'll try to spot the changes made to Moodle since December that might be related to this problem -- any help is very much appreciated, though wink

Many thanks to those of you who have helped me so far approve

Cheers,
Markus

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Markus Knierim - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 7:10 AM

I might have found a quick (but dirty) fix for the CSS caching problem: In lib/weblib.php (v 1.223), I changed $cache=true into $cache=false. For some reason, this seems to do the trick.

Does anyone have a better solution for this?

Markus

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Martin Dougiamas - Saturday, March 6, 2004, 12:21 PM

I'm not aware of any changes that would cause this sort of problem you're having, and it does only seem to be appearing on this particular ISP. Please let me know if you work out what exactly is happening to cause this and I might be able to add a workaround.

...hmm .. on second thoughts ... try editing style_sheet_setup() in lib/weblib.php and removing this whole block of code:

    if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'])) {   // May not need to send stylesheet
        // Following lines from Wolfram Kriesing and John Dell
        $months = array_flip(array('Jan','Feb','Mar','Apr','May','Jun','Jul','Aug','Sep','Oct','Nov','Dec'));
        preg_match('~[^,]*,\s(\d+)\s(\w+)\s(\d+)\s(\d+):(\d+):(\d+).*~',
                   $_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'], $splitDate);
        $timestamp = gmmktime($splitDate[4], $splitDate[5], $splitDate[6], $months[$splitDate[2]]+1,
                              $splitDate[1], $splitDate[3]);
        if ($lastmodified <= $timestamp) {
            header('HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified');
            exit;
        }
    }

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Markus Knierim - Sunday, March 7, 2004, 1:15 AM

Thanks, Martin, I commented out the code, and everything looks just great big grin

I'll try to find out if there is anything peculiar in the server configuration -- I already sent an inquiry to my ISP. Thank you again for your advice!

Cheers,
Markus

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Richard Page - Sunday, March 7, 2004, 1:24 AM

Thanks Martin.

That fixed both of my installations as well.

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Martin Dougiamas - Sunday, March 7, 2004, 9:45 AM

OK, great. I was never happy with that code anyway ... someone sent it in to me and I included it without thinking much about it... it's history now (deleted from Moodle 1.2).

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by W Page - Sunday, March 7, 2004, 10:23 AM

Hi Martin!

Just for educational value. What was that code all about?

WP1

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Martin Dougiamas - Sunday, March 7, 2004, 11:21 AM

Basically, it would return a special code if the page hadn't changed since last time. It depends on special support in both the browser and the server, though, and I'm not sure how reliable the parsing code was (ie how standard the formatting of the server variable is). I don't think many servers currently support this function so removing it won't make much difference to most of us.

This is something that can be re-implemented later, perhaps.

Google for HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE for more details.

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Don Quixote - Monday, March 8, 2004, 7:19 PM

Hi all,

I have this problem too since 1 or 2 days. But I think it has something to do with IE6, because I got this strange behaviour with the styles also when visiting the google, the yahoo or (m)any other websites (even at microsoft.com and msn.com). Emptying the browser cache or "forced refreshing" doesn't correct it.

And with Netscape 6 it works fine. Some of the visited websites run Linux/Apache and some Win/IIS, so doesn't that mean it has to do with IE6?

Greetings
Andreas

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Markus Knierim - Tuesday, March 9, 2004, 2:59 AM

Hi Andreas,

I also think that this strange caching behavior (at least as far as the styles are concerned) is, in part, an IE 6 problem. For example, I discovered today that when I change my config.php and styles.php files for a Moodle theme, IE 6 doesn't apply some (!) of the changes right away. For instance, when I change the logo, IE 6 "catches" the modification instantly, but it takes ages to "catch" a changed background color/image. Just like you said, even a forced refresh doesn't work. Weird, isn't it?

Netscape 7 and Opera 7.23, on other hand, cause no problems at all.

Schöne Grüße in die Schweiz! cool
Markus

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Re: Display problems with Moodle 1.2b

by Don Quixote - Tuesday, March 9, 2004, 9:41 AM

Hi Markus,

In styles.php I thoroughly defined the styles which appeared incorrectly in the IE (I put particularly the font-size explicitly; no inheriting from the default paragraph <p> definition e.g.) and then it was "suddenly" okay. As you mentioned the strange thing is that some styles seem to update immediately and some after a long time only.

What puzzled me most is that when visiting google, yahoo, dict.leo etc. today sometimes it was okay and afterwards it was weird again there too. Checking with Netscape 6.2 and 7.1 was always okay. But my site didn't show this behaviour again after my "strategy" (don't ask me why it worked...) above.

Viele Grüsse nach Kassel! big grin

Andreas

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Display problems with Moodle 1.2b