I just upgraded to 1.1.3 from 1.0.8. I got off to a rough start because the ZP Documentation simply says upgrading from 1.1.x is simple, but offers no explanation on how to upgrade from 1.0.x. I was tripped up a while because I did not copy over the .htaccess file (it was hidden when I did my upload).

Now I've done that and I'm able to access the administration for my gallery via /photos/admin (mod rewrite is working just fine here). I can view all of my albums, comments, and images just fine from within the admin. However, when I try to visit my gallery at /photos I get just a blank page. I've tried changing to different themes. No luck.

I'm not sure where to start troubleshooting this. I'm on dreamhost (for another 7 months, anyway) if that matters...

Look for your CGI error log. Blank pages are usually an indication of a script error somewhere. However, mod-rewrite is not used by the admin pages, so there is a strong possibility that it is not working. Have you run the setup program after uploading the .htaccess file?

Thanks for the note about the .htaccess file. We will add a warning about looking for hidden files. Still setup should have warned you that it was missing.

I'm not sure if "CGI Error Log" is any different than the error.log file I have access to via FTP, but that file gets no new entries when I hit my photos directory.

I have rerun setup.php multiple times (as an aside - shouldn't users delete this and upgrade.php when they are done for security reasons?). I don't see any errors. Everything gets a green check mark and clicking "Go" completes fine with no errors.

On a hunch, I checked the permissions on .htaccess, thinking that perhaps it wasn't writeable by the setup program. Indeed, permissions were 644, so I updated them to 777 (is this secure to leave like this?) and re-ran setup. It didn't help.

ModReWrite must be working at some level because http://derekandcristina.com/photos/admin correctly redirects me to zp-core/admin.php.

If anyone out there familiar with dreamhost can help me figure out where the CGI Error Log is, that'd be awesome.

dprior:

No need to delete setup.php or upgrade.php once you have estabilshed a user/password, they are required to access these pages.

I looked at your site. You are definately getting some kind of error--the html for the page is incomplete.

Please be sure to follow this tutorial: http://www.zenphoto.org/support/topic.php?id=316&replies=31

I've done it numerous times on Dreamhost and it always works for me.

Good, I will add that link to our article in the user guide.

I've emailed dreamhost to see if I can find out what the error is. In the meantime, I created a new installation of ZenPhoto (completely empty, in a new subdirectory) and it works.

So there's some cruft somewhere from my upgrade that's causing the issue.

This appears to be caused by a bad upload. I noticed index.php was 0kb. I re-uploaded the file and everything is working. Thanks for all the suggestions.

Is it techincally feasible for ZP to do an MD5 checksum on the files during setup and compare it to the known value, providing a warning if it's different? This is clearly user error, but it might save you some support inquiries.

I suppose it is possible. It might take a bunch of server cpu and would be troublesome unless the whole process is automated. I will create a ticket and see what we can do.