Who is Familiar with Cutenews?

Cutephp.com had a pretty good flatfile cms before called cutenews, the last update was version 1.4.5 and some of the fanatics released their own new versions based on this one via strawberry, and others developed a MySql version.

Heaps more are stuck with the original, the only problem is with the comments system.

What happens is that, the comments.txt db of the installation goes blank or back to 0bytes.

What do you think causes the deletion of the flatfile comments on a cutenews installation?

This concerns me as I have been experimenting on this cms for quite a while...

I can't say what causes it as I never used it (and to be honest I would never use a txt file cms) but I guess in the install it is creating the files and delete them. It should be something like :

$fp = fopen('/path/to/commentFile', 'w');?>

If you change that to :

$fp = fopen('/path/to/commentFile', 'a');?>

it will probably installed without erasing any file.

IMHO I do like SQL databases as opposed to text files, but to get all bases covered in learning PHP, the primitive process of analyzing flatfile dbs is a must.

There is no problem with the "CMS installation" per se, the problem lies when the cms is already running, ie. it is used by the site already... Most functions works like a charm, until the site owner later discovers that the comments to the posts on his website mysteriously disappears. There first reaction would actually to think their site was hacked, but if you trace it carefully, theres no attempt at all but notice your comment db file is blank.

One of my conclusions is a server time out during loading of the db causing it to default. Or an excessive amount of posts that crashes it. Ive prevented the latter from happening by coding a basic captcha, and flood protection... this manages to cut out on spam comments, but doesn't solve the comment db crashes...

And that's the reason that you should avoid text files :)

1) The size might be a problem.
2) If two concurrent connections try to write to the file, the best thing happens is to erase the file, the worst is to crash the server.

So any quick remedies?

I was thinking if its possible to simply recode the comment area to write and read through a mysql db...

I know theres a risk in using the text db principle, but i was experimenting on it trying to solve the issue.

One more thing, did you know Limbo is a flatfile version of Mambo/Joomla? Why doesn't its comments db crash like on cutenews? I was figuring the problem, and alternately inspected on Limbo, where there is no occurrence of a flatfile db crash...

The fact that both have flat files, does not mean that they have the same bugs :)

In my opinion don't waste your time. Get a mysql based CMS and start from there. Flat files can not give what a database can, plus they are not faster than a db.

I agree... Im not using it commercially, just for small projects, etc... if we could just solve that one bug, we could help a bunch of them out there who's having the same issues. (I know theres many, I actually searched LOL!)...