Blog about concrete5 cms

concrete5 allows to set custom page type icons instead of the standard ones easily.

Step 1. Prepare images for each page type you are going to have on your website.

Step 2. Create a file set in the file manager (Dashboard -> File Manager -> Sets). Name it “Page Type Icons”

Step 3. Upload the images to file manager and add them to “Page Type Icons” set.

Step 4. Go to page types management page (Dashboard -> Pages and Themes -> Page Types). Open the "Settings" page for each page type, set appropriate image and update.

That’s all.

The tables built with our Tables addon by default have no custom styling. We went this way because we want to allow the site builders and theme developers customize the table layout via css making it fit the overall website design. Here is how a simple table looks by default:

No borders, no background, etc. But all of that can be added via CSS styling.

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Some people might have noticed that Google sometimes indexes websites’ directories even though that was not supposed to be shared. For example, if you install concrete5, the /themes, /packages, /concrete and other directories might get indexed by Google. Also, some malicious people can open that directories and view the list of its contents, for example, they can see what packages are installed on your website if they type the URL in browser like yourdomain.com/packages/
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Doing backups is always good. If something crashes, you can restore the website from backup. If your website is changing dynamically, even a backup made a week ago might be too outdated and you will lose a lot of information and efforts restoring the website from that state, that’s why it is important to make backups often enough to keep the loss of information as low as possible. If you backup your websites manually, you might spend a lot of time (especially if you often do it), so let’s try to automate this process as much as possible.

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Some new concrete5 users get confused when they cannot find a way to add table to a page at their concrete5 website. However in fact there are several ways to do that. I will describe 4 ways to add table on the page with concrete5 cms… Read more…

We wrote about concrete5 generating core dump files on some hostings before, we’ve did a thorough investigation of this problem, but still couldn’t find the exact reason for the core dump files being generated. But most likely it happens when concrete5 tries to allocate more resources than the system allows the php process to get.
If the solution we described (increasing memory limit) doesn’t help you, you can try this workaround which makes concrete5 delete core dump files after the script is run. Our investigations show that usually nothing really bad happens when a core dump file appears, but it might be very bad if you collect numerouse core dump files and exhaust your account limit.

So, try this:
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Recently I noticed that sometimes concrete5 can cause core dump files generated in root concrete5 directory. The files look like core.12345 where 12345 is a process id. It seems that the problem is caused by the application getting out of memory.

You can try to resolve it by increasing memory limit for php. For example, hostgator hosting allows you to upload php.ini file with configuration directives.

You can use the following line to set memory limit to 32 megabytes (or more if you like):

memory_limit = 32M

core dump files contain the application state data only and can be safely deleted without breaking your application. If you are experienced developer or advanced unix user, you can investigate why the application had crashed with gdb utility (GNU project debugger). Use man gdb for reference on the utility usage.

For example:

gdb -c core.4010

It shows the following result:
Core was generated by `/usr/bin/php /home/user/public_html/index.php'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
[New process 4010]
#0 0x0830f8bf in ?? ()


Segmentation fault occurs when applications try to access more memory than it is allowed. So try increasing memory limit. That should help you.

When the problem can be reproduced. The mbstring errors can occur if you are on concrete 5.2 and do one of the following:
– add blocks in page editing mode (Fatal Error: Call to undefined function mb_detect_encoding() in);
– execute search engine index routine;
– in ‘Add functionality’ when concrete5 tries to connect marketplace;
– maybe in other cases when mbstring functions are used.

If you are on hosting. First, you should know what hosting account you have. If you are on dedicated or VDS (virtual dedicated server), then the problem can be resolved by installing mbstring extension for php, see Windows server or Unix server section below depending on what kind of server system is used on your concrete5 hosting.

If you are on shared hosting, you should check if you can edit php.ini. Run a simple script called phpinfo.php with the following code:


<?php
phpinfo();
?>


There find php.ini path (configuration file path). It’s usually not editable for you.

Create a simple php.ini file (may be even empty) and upload to your root web directory where the phpinfo.php file is. Run the phpinfo.php script again and take a look if configuration file path changed. If changed, it means you can continue trying to fix the mbstring problem. If not, you should likely to change your hosting provider or contact their support.

If you are on windows. Find the following line in php.ini


;extension=php_mbstring.dll


Remove semicolon to uncomment and try concrete5 again. Most probably you will need to download php_mbstring.dll (for your php version) and upload to extension dir.

If you are on Unix server, instruction is quiet the same but the extension will have the php_mbstring.so filename.

If you are a server admin, you can recompile php with –enable-mbstring configure option. See more details here:

http://php.net/manual/en/mbstring.installation.php