A client contacted recently to ask for help in automating data entry to their Google Spreadsheets. They were copying and pasting information from form submissions, and also donations, into their spreadsheets manually. They hired us for a few hours of labor and we used the Google Sheets API and set up for them a system to automate all of those tasks. They investment they made will pay for itself soon as these tools will now save them hours of labor each week.
Continue ReadingPHP 7.4
All of our servers now support PHP 7.4. You can read more in the official guide for migrating from PHP 7.3.x to PHP 7.4.x here: https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration74.php PHP 7.4 brings performance improvements over previous PHP versions. From now all new accounts on our servers will have PHP 7.4 as the default PHP version. Existing accounts can be easily switched to PHP 7.4 via the hosting Control Panel > PHP Settings > Default PHP Version tab.
Continue ReadingCiviHosting Marketplace
CiviHosting has now a new feature — our “Marketplace” or “Client Area.” Managing your existing services and ordering new ones, including domain name transfers, is now all available easily online at one place. The URL of our Client Area is https://clientarea.civihosting.com/ but to login most easily for the first time, visit your hosting Control Panel and click on the Marketplace tab. Then click on Login and you will be able to set your password and then login. Once in, you can see all of your existing services with us, renew them, and add more services. If you have multiple hosting accounts, they are all initially associated with separate accounts in… Read More
Continue ReadingMediaWiki: Main Slot of Revision not Found in Database
We recently migrated and then upgraded a MediaWiki, and the upgrade was a major upgrade. It run successfully, but then tome pages, such as the home page, showed errors like this: MediaWiki\Revision\RevisionAccessException from line 1676 of /home/mysite/www/www/includes/Revision/RevisionStore.php: Main slot of revision 38921 not found in database! We found several reports of this error online and the Mediawiki RevisionAccessException forum page on https://www.mediawiki.org/ suggests a solution. We tried that and found that using $wgMultiContentRevisionSchemaMigrationStage = SCHEMA_COMPAT_WRITE_BOTH | SCHEMA_COMPAT_READ_OLD; in LocalSettings.php fixed the problem.
Continue ReadingLet’s Encrypt CAA bug
Let’s Encrypt recently announced a very serious issue called the CAA bug. You can read up for more details about it on the Let’s Encrypt Community site Arstechnica blog Sucuri Blog CiviHosting was quick to act. Our system administrators checked all the Let’s Encrypt certificates installed on our servers, and we reissued any affected ones, before the issue came to be a problem for any of our clients.
Continue ReadingHow to Disable Stop Words in Search on Semantic MediaWiki
Semantic MediaWiki by default comes with a set of words that it will not search on. See here for details: Full-text_search Recently we had a client who wanted to disable this on his site so that users could search for words like “everybody” and “everything” on his site. So we changed the MySQL table type of the searchindex table from MyISAM to InnoDB and that fixed the issue.
Continue ReadingHow to Install a MediaWiki Extension
There are two basic steps to installing a MediaWiki Extension. One is to add the code and the second is to active the extension. Below we will detail various options how to accomplish each step. Add Extension Code On each Extension page, there should be installation instructions, that include the location of the code. Normally, extension code can be downloaded from Extension Distributor page and there will be a link to that. You can now either use SSH or download the file to your computer. If you know what ssh is and how to use it, then probably we don’t need to tell you more. But if you need a… Read More
Continue ReadingHow to Debug Shell Script
If your shell script errors on a CiviHosting server, just prefix it with /bin/sh -x like this: /bin/sh -x myscript params etc…
Continue ReadingCiviCRM Export Problem Fixed
Recently a client contacted us that exporting Contact data in CiviCRM was failing with this error: Error: Cannot unset offsets in CRM_Export_BAO_ExportProcessor->setAdditionalFieldsForPostalExport() (line 169 of /home/username/www/www/sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM/Export/BAO/ExportProcessor.php” This appeared to be the same issue that was reported here: Error “Cannot unset string offsets” exporting using custom field mapping and so we upgraded their site and that indeed fixed the problem. We are always here to help.
Continue ReadingCiviCRM Cron Job Error Fixed
Recently a client contacted us with this message: We updated CiviCRM on the 5th Dec to 5.19.4 but the cron jobs stopped when we did this. The error message from the Control Panel is Warning: Unsupported declare ‘strict_types’ in /home/username/www/www/sites/all/modules/civicrm/vendor/league/csv/src/functions.php on line 12 Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘:’, expecting ‘{‘ in /home/username/www/www/sites/all/modules/civicrm/vendor/league/csv/src/functions.php on line 33 We fixed this by updating the PHP version of their cron job to 7.2.
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