General Troubleshooting Guide

Users Can't Log In

In the event that no user can seem to log onto the web site, there is a possibility the sessions database table has become corrupted. It appears the log-in process works, but still shows no user logged in.  This is true for all users, even the super-admin. ...

The Site Displays a Nearly Blank Page with "Resouce Not Found"

In the event you browse to the web site and see a nearly empty page with a "resouce not found" error displayed, there is a possibility the 'conf/config.php' file is missing, corrupt, or unable to connect to the exponent database. You can browse to your web site, but you only see a portion of the web site header with an incorrect style, and see a message about "resource not found." ...

The Site Displays Some Good Pages and Some Broken Pages

If your site seems to display some pages ok, but others are broken or the style is lost, ...

Modules are Displayed, but Can't be Edited, even with Permission

If you can see a module and its content, but can't change the settings or edit it and you have appropriate permissions, the module is probably inactive. ...

The Site Works OK, Except When You Turn Search Engine Friendly (SEF) On.

If you are able to browse around your site, but when you turn on the Search Engine Friendly switch in Site Configuration, you are always returned to the default page or can't get to any other pages.  ...

Email sent from the web site loses it's style or has the wrong return address.

Most likely you have the 'Use php's mail() function instead of SMTP' setting turned on.  Because it's a simpiified mailer, it sometimes isn't accurate (but may get the mail out).  To correc this, you have must configure the mail server to use SMTP.  Information about this part of the Site Configuraion can be found here. ...

Some Module Content Doesn't Seem to Import or Known Valid Tables Are Listed as 'Unused'

This problem only occurs when using different web server OS's where one of them is Windows (using Apache). ...

My site was working, but now I only get the "Site is Down" screen

If you had a running site and without placing it in 'Mainenance Mode', it displays that screen and you are unable to log in as an admin, it means that your database is down or not found.  You should notice the 'Database is currently Off-line!' message which is displayed if the database can not be reached. ...

My embedded links used to work, but since I moved the site, they are broken

If you moved your site out of the original subfolder, any embedded links will point to the old location.  Embedded links are relative to the root web folder, NOT the Exponent folder.  Therefore, if you move to a different subfolder or to the root folder, the links are not longer valid and must be edited and changed. ...

No matter what url I enter, I'm taken back to the home page

If you enter a url for your site and are always taken back to the home page, this could be a normal situation. ...

The WYSIWYG editor dims out whenever I try to (fill in the blank)

There is a problem with the WYSIWYG editor (CKEditor) and Internet Explorer (IE) when there are many stylesheets in the theme.  IE has a known bug where it can only load a limited amount of style sheets.  Therefore, when you try to do an action in the editor which would open up a dialog box, it'll crash.  If you must use IE, then you'll need to turn on Minification to reduce the number of css stylesheet links being loaded (btw, this might speed up page loading slightly) ...

I just upgraded to a new version and my pages are not displayed correctly

If you are using a custom theme (one which did NOT ship with the Exponent package), it may be using some obsolete features which are no longer included in the system. ...

Unable to Log Out of site

On some servers (Ubuntu based?) you are taken to a login screen instead of being logged out of the site.  There are two fixes to this issue: ...

Twitter: Basic authentication is not supported

This error occurs because Twitter has deprecated its old way of 'doing business'.  The fix is to edit the twitter module configuration settings and them save them again without changes. ...

My site now appears to have two navigation menus at the top of the page

Most likely you used to have a menu and a 'breadcrumb' view and did not update the custom theme to conform with the changes in v2.0.9+.  You'll need to edit your theme template (index.php and subthemes) a replace the part which shows: ...