I recently installed minibb on a php 5.3 system and then upgraded it to 5.5. Now when I load the page I get a strange error demanding that I set a value in php.ini for a timezone value. I set it to the default "UTC" and now I get a blank page for minibb, it was working prior to php 5.5. I tried changing it to Europe/Kiev but it still produces a blank page.

Would anyone know if there are issues with php 5.5 and minibb?
I'm trying to eliminate the problems.

Yes, there could be lots of issues regarding PHP 5.5 and miniBB. Currently, I don't know about them all and just wondering how you plugged it into PHP 5.5, because, as I understand, in 5.5 "the original MySQL extension is now deprecated", so until we do not have mySQLi module released, you couldn't run miniBB at all.

Regarding the timezone issue... most probably you did it right, but you may experience the blank screen because of some other issue. Like I wrote above, it could be that PHP doesn't support mySQL commands anymore.

We expect to release the mySQLi module in July, but I couldn't promise the exact terms. There are too many events in my life which deattach me from the work on the project.

thanks, that basically solves it for me. i'll downgrade everything to 5.4 and start testing it.
thanks again!

jackf
By 'setting time zone' - do you mean this variable from the setup_options.php file:

//$timeDiff=21600;

Or something else - how do you set time zone?

no, the timezone value i'm talking about is inside of php.ini
date.timezone

strangely, this is happening with 5.4 as well. no error message, just a blank white screen. do u know of 5.4 causing problems as well? I thought I tested for 5.4 a while back and everything worked well enough.

5.4.x should not cause any problems, we're running miniBB forums on it as well.

Blank screen usually means there could be some error, but you just don't see it. If you have an access to php.ini, try to set error_reporting=E_ALL to turn all notices and errors on, probably you may get an idea from that.

Do you run LiteSpeed server? I'd try to put this in setup_options.php to set up time zone:

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Kiev');

Actually E_ALL was set already. This is a UAT server and php 5.4 is throwing this problem. When I switch everything back to 5.3 the forum displays normally. I can't even get the _install.php to work

tom322, No this is not LiteSpeed Server but where in setup_options.php did you add this?

Could be anywhere, but you can place it somewhere at the bottom in this file.

Do other php scripts run on this type of the server? I am just not sure what UAT is about. We have never tested miniBB with that.

You could debug miniBB's index.php to determine where the script stops to execute, may be then you could catch the nature of the trouble.
For example, from the very top of index.php start to put

Then re-run the script and watch if it displays "1" or not. When it stops to display 1, it should mean there is a breakpoint.

Thanks for the tip Paul, I found the line that is causing everything to fail. Its whenever a file includes setup_$DB.php
Which in this case has to be setup_mysql.php - Its the very first line of setup_mysql.php:
mysql_connect($DBhost, $DBusr, $DBpwd) or die ('<b>Database/configuration error.</b>');

Nothing works after that line. Now I thought maybe my setup_mysql.php which modified from the original somehow so I redownloaded the package from this website and they both have the exact same line there and both produce a SHA3-hash the same.

I am very confident that my setup_mysql.php file is perfectly fine. I bring this up because I was using a custom compiled version to test with from the compiler. It includes captcha, private messages and favourites.

I even tried a fresh install of just the default minibb 3.0.3 with only the setup_options.php modified to have the DB and mainURL fields added. Same result at the same line. If I add the echo 1 to the start of the setup_mysql.php it will show. But not after the first line.

Now it may very well be an issue with my own server configuration because everything works fine on 5.3 but not on 5.4/5.5. The only issue is that not only do other PHP scripts execute properly, I was able to install Anchor CMS and Wordpress on it today, using php 5.4 and the same mysql database.

Oh yeah, a UAT server is just short for User Access Testing. Just a testing server that we then transfer to the live system.

If mysql_connect makes this error, I could not suggest anything else that re-check your permissions and/or proper login, password to the certain database you are using. May be it is just not present?.. not sure.

You could create a test script which connects to the same database with the same data and try to make a simple selection from there. Actually, miniBB does not use something special regarding mySQL operations, so probably there is just an access problem.

Let us know if it would be solved somehow...

I figured it out perfectly now!

It is an issue between php extensions for mysql and mysqli on the different php versions.

Oh my goodness, sorry for all the trouble and thank you for your help in this. While I can't use it on 5.5 until its been updated for it, I can switch it to 5.4.

Thanks!!!!!!