My Adventures together with Vanilla and Pagelines 2.0 - Or what to do if your website turns blank.

[stoltz+ 0]

I'm posting this because it might help someone else when they are setting up a vanilla forum and integrating it with PageLines 2.0. I went for the Vanilla forum because it is supposed to be easy to set up and integrate with PageLines 2.0 and it is dead easy if you know how to set up a MySQL database with your hosting provider, Vanillaforums.org offers some really good documentation on how to do everything so the process is dead easy - When it works. I did everything that was mentioned in the documentation of PageLines 2.0 and the documentation that was provided by VanillaForums.org and PageLines and Vanilla married straight away. Now my problems started. When I tried to access the forum on my site, it all turned blank... there was nothing. I found this to be quite strange because I had, just a couple of minutes before, accessed the dashboard inside Vanilla. My screen was literally blank and there was no error message to be found on the screen. I went in to my hosting providers control panel and looked and the error logs where it was clearly stated that I had a bunch of php-scripts exceeding the allowed memory and some of the came out of Vanilla directories. There is usually no easy way to fix this, the solution is to increase the available memory for your scripts, which means that you probably have to get nitty-gritty with a file that usually resides in the root directory of your web server. The infamous php.ini file I dove into my php.ini file and increased the available memory. This procedure is usually not enough to solve the problem, the php.ini usually has to be copied into the directories where your memory hungry php-scripts resides (the ones in the error logs). I did this and behold...Vanilla Forum was running smoothly together with pagelines 2.0. Before I found the solution I went through almost two days trying to find the cause and then the solution. I had all kinds of strange errors coming up. I could sometimes run Vanilla if I turned off the header in pagelines and sometimes when I turned off the navigation bar. So if your site turns blank when trying to run Vanilla, then check to see if you have any php-scripts that are exceeding the available memory. It might save you a couple of days.

[Rob 547]

I cannot begin to express how well crafted your topic post is and how helpful. I've bumped this up to a sticky because it's incredibly important to many of our fellow PageLines 2.0 users. The title has an Kubrickian quality and the content is quite eloquently put, informative and beneficial to others. Thank you so much for taking the time to post this to the forums and for your kind dedication to others. You did exactly what we should all do to help each other. Bravo!

[Andrew 207]

Yes, thank you very much for this explanation!

[MrFent+ 28]

Excellent post stoltz, thank you for sharing. I will be adding this to the Vanilla Integration doc & giving you due credit. Do you remember exactly which memory hungry php-script directories you needed to copy the php.ini file to?

[stoltz+ 0]

The scripts that where the culprits in my case were the class scripts inside: Vanilla/applications/vanilla/modules The class.categoriesmodules.php was one that came up in my error log frequently.

[rudolfo78 0]

Sorry for question, I'm not professional. I have the same problem with Vanilla and Pagelines theme integration. I have activated the Pageline integration in Theme section Vanilla's Dashboard and my Forum page is blank. Where exactly can I find and edit that php.ini file? I was looking in my root directory...and I can't find it. Thank you, and excuse my English. Rudolfo from Slovakia.

[rudolfo78 0]

OK, I solve that with my hosting provider. I have now 256 MB for PHP scripts available. But my Vanilla Forum page with Pagelines Integration is still blank. When I choose other theme like Vanilla original theme, forum page appears normaly. Any advices please? Thanks for any help.

[Danny+ 1,327]

Hi Rudolf, Can you provide a link to your website please.

[rudolfo78 0]

Hi Danny, link to my forum Page is: http://www.macweb.sk/forum/ Thanks a lot.