Poor Joomla Code, again
by Andrew Macpherson on Nov.13, 2012, under Operations
We were asked to install the current version of Joomla (2.5.8) for a customer. Should just be a moment’s work? Not so.
The people who wrote the install code try to do everything with absolute paths. This is fine if you are running on a single-use server. It blows up when one uses cgiwrap to protect the users of a shared server from each other.
To make matters worse, this “Absolute Path” gets calculated in many different places (why?), and I’ve mentioned that I consider Joomla to be totally object obfuscated, and just plain unmanageable before now…
Result: the install script tries to get the server to execute “.js” files, instead of downloading them as part of the page. The visible symptom is that one is stuck on the first install page (lacking the JavaScript to progress)
Solution: install on the sort of simple server the coders anticipated, then copy across, and fix up “live site” in the config file.
What a palaver
