Category Show Problems (Possible Encoding Reasons) After Upgrading From 1.4.27

[Cmaniac]

Hello everybody.

I am about to deploy Coppermine gallery 1.5 on my website.

This major upgrade came together with a host change (from USA to Europe), the gallery is in testing stage and I have loaded just 20-30 files to make this testing proccess possbile.

Up to now, I dumped my gallery's database via the tools my webhost makes available for me.

Restored everything, uploaded 1.5 over 1.4 folders and ran the update. Update proccess went fine, I adopted a new theme making the required mods to make coppermine fit my demands and everything seems to be working almost fine, with the modding proccess at 80% done.

As you have noticed, I said almost fine and that's because coppermine after the upgrade appears to be... confused with my categorization.

Let me make it more precise and have a look back at the past.

Initially coppermine was installed on my website in version 1.4.10, not by me (3 and a half years ago I was not an Administrator on this website, right now both the owner and me co-operate on that) and possibly via fantastico script. Initially upgrades took place really rarely causing many problems (site hacking etc), but since I gained access, upgrades were applied at almost every version that was released (1.4.22-1.4.25 were not applied because they were causing problems on file upload).

The bad thing from the start was that the database was created with latin1 encoding (swedish collation) although Greek language is the main language that is used there. I wasn't there at that time to see if there was something better to be done and the other person thought that as it worked it shouldn't need anything more than that. That's how our gallery shows every greek character FINE but over phpmyadmin is everything messed up (which has cause NO problems up to now). I know the ideal would be UTF-8 and the newer databases that we use are encoded in UTF-8 as they should be supposed to from the start.

I have many times tried to resolve this problem by re encoding with iconv but I ended up messing things even more with the gallery showing only special characters. But now I think the encoding problems have now put a headache on me.

One more thing you should know about this gallery (both 1.4 and 1.5 versions (the stable and the test) is that it is bridged with MyBB on its latest available release and the bridge is (thank god) working better than I was expecting to work

So here is the actual problem:
We use nested categories to organize our albums over the gallery.

Normally, when you are on gallery's home and you click on one category all the nested categories on that category should appear, as defined in category manager.

But when clicking on one category it shows the supposed subcats and also empty spaces that are linking (when opening the source) to another category that works fine and its nested on another main cat.

Interesting, isn't it?

I am sorry I can't at the time of this post give you a link on this test gallery (as I told you earlier we are in a webhost change process and the directories are not yet structured for public access - we are currently testing the new provider) but I will attach you some screenshots of the situation.

In one or two days a link would be possible, I know it is mandatory, but please show some patience. I want to deploy 1.5 and I believe that, the earlier the suggestions come, the earlier the solution would come, too.

Thank you,
Cmaniac

[Joachim Müller]

You appear not to have performed the upgrade as we suggest in our documentation. We have strict board rules that you need to follow, e.g. Board rules / Forum policies: Post Links.

[Cmaniac]

You appear not to have performed the upgrade as we suggest in our documentation.

What else can and should be done (other that disabling the plugins and running update.php)?

The only thing that could be a glitch on the process is that i totally disabled the plugin manager instead of uninstalling every single plugin.

As a test installation, everything can be done again to double check that.

Ps. As an admin and good english-speaking person, I know what following the rules means.

I cannot post a link as I said because in two hours it will be surely dead, as a mass data tranfer will be started in minutes from now. Some patience, please, I'm not hiding my public website, that would be nonsense.

[Cmaniac]

Thank you for being patient, this is what the output looks like
http://leoforeia.gr/photos_cpg15/

And translated
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://leoforeia.gr/photos_cpg15/&sl=el&tl=en

The problem shows up on cat id 31
http://leoforeia.gr/photos_cpg15/index.php?cat=31

Note, this is the only category that includes a subcategory with meta-albums.

[Joachim Müller]

Note, this is the only category that includes a subcategory with meta-albums.

What's that? A feature I haven't heard of?

[Cmaniac]

Albums with meta tags...   

[Cmaniac]

Albums with meta tags...   

Sorry I was confused, meaning keywords 

[Cmaniac]

Just posting to make the differences the differences

This is the original category with 1.4 and how it is designed to look like (in use)
http://leoforeia.gr/photos2/index.php?cat=31

This is in the test gallery, the same category, with 1.5..
http://leoforeia.gr/photos_cpg15/index.php?cat=31

[Joachim Müller]

Turn notices_display off for a start.

[Cmaniac]

Done.

I wanted you to see the notices, just in case there was something helpful there..

[Cmaniac]

Update: Yep, it definitely is an album Keyword problem that affects the way the categories are shown.

Whenever I remove the one specific category that includes in it only albums that have only linked files in them, the problem seems to disappear.

[Cmaniac]

Problem solved in version 1.5.8.