Where should I report a bug?
Bugs and issues are dealt with in the forum. Please do
not use the contact us form to report a bug you will only be asked to repost in the forum. Please do
not report a bug by creating a Github issue - we use the Github issues log as our To-Do list of fixes for bugs which have been diagnosed, not those which are just being reported. Whist this sounds slightly authoritarian it has a number of advantages for both you and ourselves:
- You will get an answer quicker in the forum than by email. The contact us form currently goes to Rob Clayburn's inbox. He starts his day by looking at the forum posts - not his email, so altready your bug has been relegated to the bottom of the pile
- Fabrik is a community - make use of its network of users; other members of the forum can supply an answer, possibly before one of the project's team members.
- Once resolved other members have the possibility to find your question and its solution without having to wait for us to respond.
Please make sure that you post in the correct forum for your Fabrik version and for the level of your subscription.
I've got a whitescreen - what next?
If you get a white screen whilst performing a task within Fabrik, please enable error reporting by following these instructions:
- First ensure that your PHP Installation has at least a 64mb memory limit (Site -> System Information -> PHP Information -> then find the entry 'memory_limit' somewhere in the Core section)
- From your administration site's top menu select: site->global configuration
- Select the 'server' tab
- From the 'Error Reporting' drop down select 'Maximum'
- Save your configuration file
- Then go back to the page that was giving you a white screen. This time you should see a set of warning and/or error messages which were created by PHP when the page was run.
- Please copy and paste all of these messages into a forum post
If your entire site is showing a white screen then you can turn on error reporting by editing your site's htaccess file and adding the following line at the end of the file
Code:
php_flag display_errors on
What can I try myself to narrow down the issue?
- First of all back up your site!
- Are there any Javascript errors on the page? (You need to look in your browser's console to see Javascript errors). If so please report those in your forum post.
- Often if its a front end issue this is caused by a conflict between Fabrik and some other template/module/plugin. Systematically remove these on by one from the page causing the issue and see if the error disappears. For your site's template use one of the default templates that Joomla is installed with.
- Check if you use template overriding. If yes try to disable it - for example by renaming <your site>/templates/<your template>/html/com_fabrik folder to anything else. Probably it destroys styling of your site - but may fix site functioning. At least you'll be sure that problem is not in your own code...
- Are you using any custom Javascript code - located in components/com_fabrik/js/ these may alter the default behaviour of Fabrik so prefix the files with an '_' to ensure they are not loaded e.g. from 'list_1.js' for example to '_list_1.js'
- Try reinstalling Fabrik - may be any Fabrik files were changed/corrupted.
- Update Fabrik's code from Github, perhaps we've already fixed the issue, if so a simple update might fix things.
What content should you put in a bug report post?:
- Please be as descriptive and accurate as possible - things that are obvious to you may not be to us, the more information you post in your initial post the less likely we are to have to ask for it later on, slowing down the process of fixing the actual issue.
- Supply screen shots (as a picture is worth a thousand words) both of your problem and of pertinent settings.
- Please make sure you state which versions of Joomla and Fabrik you use, and whether you have recently updated from Github.
- Describe what browser you are using, and is the issue specific to that browser
- If in step 2 of 'What can I try myself to narrow down the issue' you found a conflict please report which template/module/plugin caused the issue.
- If possible point us at the page/URL which is causing the error, seeing the issue is often a lot more instructive for us that reading a long description. Please give the FULL url not the site's main URL along with a description of how to find the link - this is just time consuming for us (often sites have 10 or so menus each with 10 or so Menu items, and with SEF URLs turned on its almost impossible to know which page is causing the issue.
- Wherever possible it helps Fabrik staff if you provide the login details to your site via the My Sites page. Only Fabrik staff can see this information. Avoid using PM's (Private Messages) as much as possible to provide this information. Double triple check that the log-in actually works. It's frustrating to start looking at an issue and find we can't get in. All we can ask for is for you to provide the correct the user details so we can log in.
- If you have trouble writing English or explaining what you've done then create a screen cast with Jing or if you're running Win7 use the "Problem Steps Recorder" psr.exe.
What content should you put in a bug report post?
Please see the
Forum Post Template.