Dolphin 7 Troubleshooter

If your web-server complies with Dolphin Hosting Requirements and you carefully followed al the steps described in Dolphin 7 Installation Guide, your site should work just fine. In some (rare) cases, you may encounter a problem. In this document we gather the most common known issues and their possible solutions.

I see a blank page in the place of my Dolphin Home page.

Your server probably refuses to use relative paths, so that PHPs' require_once instructions can't find the files specified. To resolve the problem you should add the following string as the first instruction in index.php, inc/design.inc.php and admin/index.php.

ini_set("include_path", "path_to_script");

You should replace "path_to_script" with the absolute path to your script's folder.

My page comes out gibberish. When I look at the source I see a lot of <?php ... ?> tags.

If the <?php ?> tags are being sent to the browser, it means your PHP is not working properly. All PHP code is supposed to be executed before the server sends the resulting HTML to your web browser. Make sure your web server meets the requirements to run Dolphin, that PHP is installed and configured properly, or contact your hosting provider or system administrator for assistance.

After install my home page displays "Internal error 500".

Your server probably doesn't accept .htaccess files (folder configuration files). In this case, delete .htaccess file from the folder that doesn't open or refer to your hosting provider for a reference what it should be replaced with.

I keep getting Database activation failed but I'm sure my configuration is correct.

Try resetting your MySQL password manually. If you have access to MySQL via shell, try issuing:

SET PASSWORD FOR 'dolphinusername'@'hostname' = OLD_PASSWORD('password');

If you are using a version of MySQL prior to 4.1, use PASSWORD instead of OLD_PASSWORD. If you do not have shell access, you should be able to simply enter the above into an SQL query in phpMyAdmin. Failing that, you may need to use your host's control panel to reset the password for your database user.

My security image doesn't show up on join_form.php.

Check if you have ​GD library installed and if it's compiled with Free Type fonts library. If GD library is not installed, you should install the latest version of ​ImageMagick and disable Use GD library for image processing in Admin panel -> Settings -> Advanced Settings.

My image/MP3/video uploads don't work.

Most probably, you have not set correct permissions for media/images/profile/, media/sound/ and media/video/. These folders should have 777 permissions (readable, writable, executable).

Your PHP may be also configured to upload files under specific limit. In this case, check php.ini (PHP configuration file) and edit the settings for "upload_max_filesize" statement.

Forum displays a blank page

Check if PHP is compiled with DOMXML and XSLT support.

My Dolphin site shows 500 internal server error

Your PHP is most probably running in CGI mode. The following instructions only apply to PHP running as CGI. In this mode, some .htaccess instructions may be causing this problem. First, you need to investigate your webserver error log file, for the exact error message, but most common problems are listed below:

1) Try to remove the Options -MultiViews from the file .htaccess. Also remove any php_value and php_admin_value instructions from it.

2) Another problem causing this may be incorrect permissions on some files or folders. All folders should have 755 permissions, and all files should have 644 permissions (except for flash/modules/global/app/ffmpeg.exe which should have 755 permissions).

3) All Dolphin files and folders should have your FTP user as their owner. If it is not so, this can be another reason of the problem.

Some or all of my widgets keep on loading and do not work.

1) This problem usually happens when there are writable permissions on folders and files when PHP is running in CGI mode.

To check the mode your PHP is running in, log into your Dolphin's Admin Panel and then open the page administration/phpinfo.php.

To fix it, you will need to set all folders permissions to 755 and all files to 644. The file flash/modules/global/app/ffmpeg.exe should be also set to 755.

2) This problem may also be caused by script's inability to open widgets' default skins. You can try the following tweak which will be harmless for the rest of the script functionality:

open the file flash/modules/MODULE_NAME/skins/index.php and replace the line

$sFile = $aResult['current'] . "." . $aResult['extension'];

with

$sFile = "default.swf";

You can also try to comment out these lines if you still experience the problem:

/* - comment start
require_once("../../../../inc/header.inc.php");
require_once($sIncPath . "functions.inc.php");
require_once($sIncPath . "apiFunctions.inc.php");
require_once($sIncPath . "xml.inc.php");

$aPathParts = explode("/", $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);
$iPartsCount = count($aPathParts);
$aResult = getExtraFiles($aPathParts[$iPartsCount-3], $aPathParts[$iPartsCount-2]);
comment end - */

MODULE_NAME stands for board, chat, desktop, im, mp3, photo, video or video_comments.