I want to help with php problems

[pulz]

In the discussions if something goes wrong at a gallery, people always want to get the url of the site to investigate and I have see some amazing jobs to help. Complete with alternative php codes and sometimes exactly pointing out where somebody has forgotten for instance a dot or comma.

I also want to help,  I'm not the most skilled person in php but I want to contibute/help aswell.

But how do you investigate other peoples PHP sources without ftp access? The debug mode can help a lot but therefore they have to enabled it which is not often done. So how can you help someone on php issues if you only get there website adres. As far as I know there isn't a php ripper like you gor for html based codes. PHP is processed at the server site and therefore more difficult to investigate for a client to check and in this case help if something goes wrong.

I wonder how the others get this job done?

AJ

[kegobeer]

The link provides a lot of valuable information.  As people who live, eat, and breathe Coppermine, just looking at the website and seeing the error messages and viewing the source, we often know exactly what part of Coppermine is causing the problem and therefore can offer a solution.  It also helps to have years of programming experience. 

[donnoman]

If you want to help, do as I did. I started by installing and maintaining versions of coppermine on my own machine at home.

I have a copy of 1.2 running and installed, as well as a 1.3 from cvs, and at least 4 different devel installs from cvs.

I try to recreate the users problem then modify code to suit. When using one of my cvs installs when I'm done with that users request, I'll do a cvs update clean, and my galleries go back to default Coppermine code.

I would also suggest: pick a small area where you concentrate your effort. ie: pick an area you want to work with and research, and answer questions in that area. Learn that one area really well, then start branching out as you have time and interest. Instead of trying to answer every Coppermine question that gets posted as you'll get quickly overwhelmed.

Thats how I started, I began with the themeing engine and slowly worked my way around. There are still plenty of areas of Coppermine that I haven't explored, much less could answer a question on. But I know the theming engine inside and out and that helps me when I'm offering support.

If theres an area right now that I think needs more assistance is with file upload.  I don't think this is necessarily a weakness in the coppermine code, but it has a lot to do with the variety of server setups and configs.  If you were to pick an area to start with, helping folks work out thier upload problems would be a great help.