Hi all,

Firstly, apologies if this question has been asked before, but I've already searched the forums as much as possible, as well as other Google sources, and either can't find the answer or the answers I have found I've tried and don't seem to bear fruit.

Firstly, some background. I have a fresh installation of Joomla 1.5 with the 1.2 Multisites plugin sitting on a Server 2003 box. The server is running XAMPP 1.7, which combines Apache ASP, Pear 5.10.1, Pear 1.9.0, PHP 5.3.1. All of this is a fresh install and reporting no errors. All data is held in MySQL.

I am trying to create a suite of sites that have various special offers and savings available for users.
This should be manifested in one master website that contains all my data, articles, and so on where users can log in. As a former Joomla 1.X user, this main site is easily created and I've already done a basic template and design for it, which all works correctly.

The problem now is that I want to create the series of other sites that share the same database and thus can access the same users and some of the main content as the master site. Each child site has its own domain that points to the same server box.
So, for example, let's say I have:

MASTER SITE (www.mainsite.com) - Contains offers for shopping, swimming and skiing.
SITE-A (www.sitea.com) - Contains offers for just shopping
SITE-B (www.siteb.com) - Offers for just swimming
SITE-C (www.sitec.com) - Just skiing

Now let's say Mr Bloggs might join SITE-B which is a child of the master site, and Mr Bloggs' details are logged in the master database when he joins.
SITE-B users are entitled to receive only the swimming offers on the master site, so SITE-B should be able to pull that content in from the master. Mr Bloggs logs into SITE-B and sees only those offers.

However, if Mr Bloggs also buys the shopping package, he can then access SITE-A. The adminsitration for all of this should be done through a single Joomla login panel, and all relate to data held in a single MySQL database.

I installed JMS2WIN successfully, patched and updated it, and followed Edwin's guide in the tutorial video 16, but the child site that is created is simply a blank page.

Now I know that this is actually a PHP error with the details supressed, but the problem is that even if I turn error logging to Maximum in the backend and/or force error logging in the configuration.php and/or force error logging in the .htaccess file, this child site remains blank. No matter what I do, I cannot get it to report the error and thus have no idea as to how to fix the problem.

And yes, my 'rhuk_milkyway' template is installed and looks fine.

I have a feeling that the problem may actually lie deeper than Joomla, perhaps be a permission problem in the server box itself, but as it refuses to give me any error log on the Joomla page, and as all my event logs in Windows are completely clean, I cannot see what is failing.

Can anyone offer any advice?

Small update, whilst the slave sites I create still have a blank page regardless of whether I turn error reporting on or not in Joomla, I did implement the script on THIS PAGE.

This produced an error log that shows a cluster of problems with the multisite.php script running on my server, so any help with this would be greatly appreciated. A snippet of the log is attached to this post.

The first error message show that JPATH is already defined.
So I don't know what you written to do the test but you have to review your test code.

I suggest that you use the standard joomla code to do your test and perhaps add manually debugging traces into the joomla code instead of trying creating a new program.
I suspect that you have a permission error on a file that can not be executed.

Hi Edwin,

and thanks for replying. The duplication issues in the error log have been fixed, and it is now only showing true errors (new log attached to this post).

In this log, I have logged in and tried to create a slave site as per your video 16. This has all gone successfully, but when I try to open the site I get a blank page.

If you look near the bottom of page one of this log, there are some odd errors that relate to multisites, specifically:


Look at the local file location here. It appears as though Joomla is trying to open the {site_url} but following it immediately with the a URL to a PHP script. It obviously doesn't find it because the URL is mangled.
In this, the slave site was dictated *exactly* as shown in video 16.


A second example of a mangled URL. In this one, it appears to hunt for a subfolder called 'com_multisitesaffiliate', which obviously doesn't exist (interestingly, neither does /multisites/affliate/ on my installation.

I agree wholly that I'd prefer to use the proper in-built error reporting rather than a third party script, but as I've said, swtiching that on doesn't work. I can activate it from Joomla, or use apache's own error reporting, but I still only get a blank white page in Joomla; never any kind of error logs.
I also agree that it looks like something is not correctly set somewhere, but without error logs to guide me it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Check that the patches are correctly installed.
Verify the path of the files that are mentioned.
If the files are not present, this is perhaps the symptom that you didn't install the patches.

Verify also that you have the permission to access the file.
You mentioned earlier that you are runing on Windows 2003 Server and perhaps you should check the security of the files.

edwin2win wrote:
Check that the patches are correctly installed.
Verify the path of the files that are mentioned.
If the files are not present, this is perhaps the symptom that you didn't install the patches.

Verify also that you have the permission to access the file.
You mentioned earlier that you are runing on Windows 2003 Server and perhaps you should check the security of the files.

All patches installed and showing a green OK.
The file paths mentioned above do not exist, which is obviously a problem, but Joomla has full rights to create directories and files on that server (and does so for most of the multisites files and for all other extensions added).

I have PHP error reporting active now but - unfuriatingly - I still only get blank white pages when trying to generate a slave website.

However, I have just noticed something which may shed more light.

Whilst the folder gets written just fine to the server (so in my case C:\xampp\htdocs\multisites\demo), that slave folder only contains a cache folder and two files; namely index.html (which is just a line of code for showing a blank white screen) and config_multisites.php. Is this correct? If the slave is supposed to be a separate Joomla installation, I'd have expected to see installtion files in this folder. Neither of those two files make any reference to trying an installation of any kind, or link to anything outside of the newly created slave site folder.