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beginner - Need Help

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beginner - Need Help
I'm having a few problems with errors in the admin windows, and would sincerely appreciate someone's advice. My ISP is running the latest version of Perl 5.60 on an NT server. Here's a few of the bugs:

1) Every time the "home.html" file is edited in templates admin, it packs hard breaks into the HTML code. After 5 updates to this page, the source has grown to over 300k in size because of the hard breaks. Any suggestions? Should I just edit this page in notepad and forget about it?

2) This a sample of a repeated error when links are validated in the admin (depending on how many links are validated, it may repeat dozens of times):

"Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at c:/website/htdocs/basslessons/htdocs/cgi-bin/links/admin/Mailer.pm line 300. Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at c:/website/htdocs/basslessons/htdocs/cgi-bin/links/admin/Mailer.pm line 301. Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) " etc etc.

3) This error also turns up quite a bit:
"Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at c:/website/htdocs/basslessons/htdocs/cgi-bin/links/admin/admin_html.pl line 1562."

What the heck does concatenation mean?

One poster mentioned hacking the 'sub build_html_record_form'. Could anyone elaborate on this?


Thanks very much in advance,
Rob

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Re: beginner - Need Help In reply to
In Reply To:
1) Every time the "home.html" file is edited in templates admin, it packs hard breaks into the HTML code. After 5 updates to this page, the source has grown to over 300k in size because of the hard breaks. Any suggestions? Should I just edit this page in notepad and forget about it?
Try using a TEXT EDITOR or a WYSIWYG Editor, like Dreamweaver, to edit your template files...and then upload them to your templates directory.

In Reply To:
2) This a sample of a repeated error when links are validated in the admin (depending on how many links are validated, it may repeat dozens of times):

"Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at c:/website/htdocs/basslessons/htdocs/cgi-bin/links/admin/Mailer.pm line 300. Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at c:/website/htdocs/basslessons/htdocs/cgi-bin/links/admin/Mailer.pm line 301. Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) " etc etc.
What version of Perl are you using?

In Reply To:
3) This error also turns up quite a bit:
"Use of uninitialized value in The concatenation operator is the period. (.) at c:/website/htdocs/basslessons/htdocs/cgi-bin/links/admin/admin_html.pl line 1562."
Concatenation basically means putting things together. Usually periods are used.

EXAMPLE:

$variable = $variable1 . "/dir/" . $variable.ext;

Have you hacked the admin_html.pl at all? Meaning have you edited it? What changes have you made?

The errors you've posted I've seen in servers that do not have Perl 5.0053 or above installed.

Regards,

Eliot Lee
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Re: beginner - Need Help In reply to
Eliot:

Thanks for your help-

It looks like I'll have to abandon the template editor for Notepad. Would've been very convenient to have the template editor- is this a common problem with Links 2.0?

My provider installed the latest version of Active Perl 4 weeks ago off of Perl.com. It's the latest version. He has attempted to make changes to the line errors in the Perl script with no favorable results. I will verify the exact version of perl again with the ISP tomorrow.

As far as I know, the 'admin_html.pl' script has not been hacked. I will also verify this with him tomorrow.

One other new problem - today after I ran the "build" function in the admin, and all of the category data disappeared. The front page showing all categories remained intact, as did the 'add', 'modify', 'search' etc. functions. But when one of the front page categories was clicked, the file was empty. My provider verified this and restored from a tape backup. Has anyone had a problem with this?

Thanks,
Robby

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Re: beginner - Need Help In reply to
Well, many Perl programmers have experienced problems with Perl 5.006...it does not seem to be a very reliable or stable release IMHO. I sure hope that my hosting company does not install it...Wink

In Reply To:
Has anyone had a problem with this?
Seems to be a quirk/glitch in the Perl 5.006 that is not compliant with LINKS 2.0 codes.



Regards,

Eliot Lee