Manage Entries in Particular Blog Causes Internal Service Error

Hi, James

It's a strange phenomenon and I'd like to know the situation of the issue more.

Are there any error log on you MT system log?

Can you check your Apache's error log, and if you can, are there any messages at that time?

I'd also like to know the URI's copy of the error screen, "mt.cgi?foo=bar&...", and other URI when you correctly succeeded to manage entry in other blog.

Thanks in advance.

Nick,

Thank you for your response.

The URI for a Manage Entry page on a blog that works is as follows:
/mt.cgi?__mode=list&_type=entry&blog_id=4&filter_key=my_posts

The URI for the Manage Entry page on the blog that doesn't is as follows:
/mt.cgi?__mode=list&_type=entry&blog_id=7&filter_key=my_posts

I don't see any difference there.

The MT system log shows no errors.

I can't find anything on Hostgator's Error Logs, which Hostgator suggests might be a case of exceeding system resources.

I have seven blogs on this installation. Six of them work fine, one does not. The one that does not has 587 small entries in it, while others have as many as 4136.

It's an annoying problem, but not a serious problem, as there are workarounds. I can add an entry, no problem. I can access individual entries without difficulty, and I can search for them. But I’m flummoxed as to what I'm doing differently in this instance that isn't being done on the other six blogs. Managing Pages is unaffected, as is Managing Assets. Dashboard is fine.

Is it possible that there's something in an entry title somewhere that's gone wonky? Another factor to consider is that I have just switched servers (same webhost), so I did move a number of files and the database about.

Hi, James,

Thank you for your reply.
The phenomenon you have reported sounds really strange for me.

(that you can operate all of MT's functions correctly without managing entries of particular blog.)

May I ask you more about the matter?

Is there some plugin in your MT and it is enable or make some setting at that blog?

Or with that blog, is there some garbled title entry or some special feature comparing to another blogs?

The only plugin that comes to mind is EditThisEntry, but I'm not using it for this blog, and I am using it for other blogs without incident.

I am thinking more and more that there may be some garbled title entry, but I'm a little stuck in terms of figuring out how to check this...

You must be aware of something very important! Movable Type v5.1 is still in beta phase and it is not recommended to upgrade to it yet, or to use it for production.

However, if you want to experiment with it at your own risk, and you are having issues, I would recommend you to try to disable the plugins one after another until you find if one of them is causing the trouble.

You could also activate the debug mode.

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

----------------------------------
Daily Movable Type Consultant

Web Development
Movable Type Consulting
Six Apart Partner

http://www.pro-it-service.com/
----------------------------------

Movable Type Demo
http://www.movabletypedemo.org/
----------------------------------

Open Melody Demo
http://www.openmelodydemo.org/

Thanks, Mihal. I am aware of the risks of downloading and using release candidate software, so I'm not complaining on that score. And, as I said, this problem is just odd and annoying, since there are workarounds. I thought, though, since I was having this issue, you might want to be aware of it, in case it crops up elsewhere.

I am thinking more and more that it's a problem with my own data, and it might be self-inflicted.

I'm using this particular blog as a kind of photo archive, and I've been using Categories to group these photographs into sets which get published on the web site. All of this is working well. However, to get these categories to sort, I've used hidden text in order to sort them, without having that hidden text appear when published. As an example, this is a category header:

CATEGORY: <!--053-->53 Steeles East

No surprise, I've discovered that I get an error when trying to modify a category name, although I can still save entries into the proper category, and have those entries publish properly. Also, I'm able to do a full export of this blog, but when I try to import it into a new blog, I'm told that there is an error, and I should check my import file.

Sure enough, by doing a global search and replace on <-- and -->, eliminating them for brackets, for instance, the import worked, and the Manage Entries page appeared.

You're welcome!

Consider taking off the brackets and sorting those categories using the "Sort Categories And Folders" plugin from:
http://plugins.movabletype.org/sort-categories-and-folders/

Or the "SortableCategories" one from:
http://plugins.movabletype.org/sortablecategories/

I've personally used the 1st, but the 2nd might be even better.

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

----------------------------------
Daily Movable Type Consultant

Web Development
Movable Type Consulting
Six Apart Partner

http://www.pro-it-service.com/
----------------------------------

Movable Type Demo
http://www.movabletypedemo.org/
----------------------------------

Open Melody Demo
http://www.openmelodydemo.org/

James,

It seemed you found the cause of the issue.
I'm glad to hear that.

Enjoy your Time!

Actually, I think I misdiagnosed the cause of my issue, but I think I've found it now:

The blog in question has a huge number of categories; over 300, back in the 4.35 version. When I upgraded to 5.1, however, I've found that you cannot create more than 156 categories without encountering this problem.

While it may be the case that having this many categories might not be the best way to run things in MT, the fact that such a hard limitation is suddenly there strikes me as a bug, no?

James,

As Mihai said, MT5.1 is still beta and it's an evaluation version, but I'm wondering what is the cause of the issue.

Do you mean;

* The blog before importing has over 300 categories.
* After imported to MT5.1 beta, categories have decreased to under 156?
* Or with MT5.1, you cannot produce categories over 156?

I feel that when using IE, MT5.1 beta's response is little heavy.
What kind of browser and version are you using?

Sorry to bother you, but I'd like to grasp your situation in detail.

Thanks.

Nick,

My apologies for not being clearer.

Before moving from 4.35 to 5.1 RC2, the blog in question had over 300 categories. After upgrading, the data did not change. I still had those 300 categories, but I could no longer view the Manage Entries screen without encountering a 500 Internal Server Error.

I then exported the data to a text file and deleted all entries and categories. This cleared the problem. I could now view the Manage Entries screen.

I began re-importing the data a little at a time, and could still view the Manage Entries screen until I got about partway through the importing process. Deleting and restarting, I encountered this bug repeatedly. Finally, I counted the categories. If I had 156 categories in the blog, the Manage Entries screen appeared just fine. Add one more, and suddenly I encountered an error.

I was able to finish the re-importing, adding new categories, and to work with the data through various workarounds (searching for entries, and using the Batch Edit Entries screen), but the Manage Entries screen still cannot be viewed without encountering that Internal Server Error.

So, no data was affected. In upgrading, I was able to keep all of the categories in the database, examine them, use them in adding new entries, and add to them. I was able to work with the data using workarounds. After upgrading, I was able to modify and add categories, even after having more than 156. I can produce new categories. It's just that, once you have more than 156 categories in a blog, I can not view the Manage Entries screen without encountering an Internal Server Error.

I am currently using Safari, but encountered the error in Opera and Firefox. My laptop is an Apple Macbook (I doubt that it's the problem). My site is being run on Hostgator with a fresh install of MT 5.1 RC2.

I hope all this helps! Thanks for looking into this.

I tend to believe that the issue is with your HostGator account memory, in the sense that after a certain level (above 156 categories) the server CPU halts with a premature end of script headers error.

You could confirm this assumption looking at the server logs.

For the sake of testing, I'm available to clone and install your stuff inside one of the Pair servers I'm having and see if the problem persists.

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

Hello James,

I think that I could reproduce your issue on my local environment. I passed this to the MT QA team so that they can investigate the detail. I'll let you know the result when I get a result from them. Thank you very much for your report in advance !

I created a new FogBugz case to track this issue.

http://bugs.movabletype.org/default.asp?106201

By the way, this encoding issue of the category label should be fixed at RC3.

http://bugs.movabletype.org/default.asp?106152

Hello James,

We have fixed this issue in MT5.1 RC4 which was released a few minutes ago.
The root of the cause was a regex bug in Perl 5.8.x which was fixed in 5.10.0

http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.10.0/pod/perl5100delta.pod#Regular_expressions_optimisations

To support 5.8.x with MT5.1, we changed the category filter of "Manage Entries" to an input filed instead of a pull-down menu. We would like to improve the usability in MT 5.1.1

It was really nice to catch this bug before the final release, thank you again for your report and help !

Great work! I'll download RC4 as soon as I can and check it out!

I have installed RC4 and can confirm that the bug is now fixed.

Thank you asking this question. Experiencing a similar problem. Bit more of a workaround for me, but I did get it fixed.