General Help
Here you can find information and fixes on general / regular bugs and errors that occur in several Magento Solutions.
500 Internal Server Error
Internal Server Errors can be a real pain. You’ve just spent a big chunk of your time installing your Magento solution step by step to the letter and you think everything should work brilliantly but as soon as you load up your solution you get a white screen with the 500 Internal Server Error showing.
The reason that the solution does this is simple, It is all down to your persmissions. Certain folders in your Magento installation need to be made writable. Whilst in your FTP client, make sure the following files and folders have their permissions set to 755 or 777
- /app/
- /app/etc
- /magento/
- /media/
- /var/
- /index.php
If you change the permissions to these folders and files the 500 Internal Server Error should be fixed.
Can’t Load Magento Page – The Error Report Feature
Whilst you are configuring and working on your Magento solution you are more than likely, at some point, going to be greeted by an error page which says “Whoops, our bad…” This usually happens when you have been working in the admin section of the site and you’ve referenced a file or template that doesnt exist. Fixing the error can be very difficult, mainly because the error message doesn’t tell you what’s wrong at all.
Although the actual page doesn’t tell you anything the URL can. The URL will have a long numerical Error ID. The ID will be the same ID as a file in your FTP that will enable you to see which of your templates contains the error. The directory will be /var/report.
All you have to do is open this folder and find the file which matches the number in the ID and here you can find your error report. You should see something like this within the file…
#1 /home/domains/domain.com/public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php(131): include(‘/home/
#2 /home/domains/domain.com/public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php(163): Mage_Core_Block_Template->fetchView(‘frontend/defaul…’)
#3 /home/domains/domain.com/public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php(180): Mage_Core_Block_Template->renderview()
The first line (#1) is the one that will show you where the error lies. The usual reason the error comes up is that you have tried to reference another template or a file that doesn’t exist so check thoroughly and if you are in doubt, restore the file from backup.
The thing with this error is that Magento will more than likely take your whole site down because of it, which really can be a problem for you and your customers so make sure you always check and re-check to make sure this problem doesn’t happen often.
Image Upload Failure on Magento Product Page
It has come to our attention of a re-occuring error in the Magento bcak-end where users are having problems trying to upload an image for their product. Unlike the error where the browse box doesn’t come up for the user this time the image is uploaded but just adds itself to the image list.
People suffering from this error may also find that if anything is clicked you may be kicked out to the admin login screen and when you log back in the image has disappeared.
The first thing you need to do is to make sure your media directory is Chmod’ed in FTP to 777 and also that all your files in the Magento Installation have the correct hosting account (not root).
Also, your PHP installation could be causing the error, you may need to create a php.ini file in your Magento folder that says the following within it:
magic_quotes_gpc = off
short_open_tag = on
extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so
Do this and also ensure Safe Mode is enable and you should be able to upload your images again with no problem.
