Updating to Contribute 4.x breaks the cthub XML | arfore dot com

When trying to sort my cthub XML file recently I found out that my code from the post on sorting the role listing had stopped working.

Turns out that there was an error introduced into the format of this file when upgrading from Contribute 3.11.

As you are no doubt aware, when at least one admin upgrades to Contribute 4 or Contribute CS3 (aka 4.1) all the admins have to since there are upgrades made to the XML files that control the site. Well it appears that this upgrade makes the cthub file non-valid XML.

Take a look at this file and look for the tag font_use_css inside the group_list_item child node of the group_list node. In a copy of the cthub file that was upgraded you will find that this standalone tag is missing the appropriate closing slash. If you compare this against a copy of the cthub file from before the upgrade, assuming you made a backup, you will find that the tag is properly closed.

Since this file is the master file with all of the role information for the site, I wonder if this XML error is causing unknown instability in the system somewhere.

While this is an easy fix, I will be posting some code that you can run to fix this, since editing a file like this by hand can be a real pain.

Sort the Role Listing in the Contribute Client | arfore dot com

One of the annoyances I have found with the Contribute Client is that in the Administration interface section, when adding a user, the menu of roles is not sorted for you. The list that appears when you reassign a user or when you create a new role, is sorted for you.

Each time that a new role is added, the client updates the hub file, adding the new role to the end of the list.

In investigating this I found that the hub file is just an XML file. This file is stored in the root _mm folder of the website that you are managing. Note that this file is connection specific, so if you are managing multiple websites, the location of this control file will vary. And if you are managing a large deployment by having multiple sites with a single directory structure, you will have a different _mm folder and hub file for each site, even though they are physically on the same server they are treated differently by the logic of the software.

Enable Verbose Logging on Contribute Publishing Server | arfore dot com

In the process of troubleshooting the LDAP user problems I was experiencing I found that by default the logging of info and debug messages is turned off by default for the OEM jrun install that is part of Contribute Publishing Server 3.11.

In order to enable these logging levels you have to edit the sevrer configuration xml file. This file should be located in the configuration directory of your jrun4 server’s WEB-INF folder.

The name of the file is: ckm.xml

Open this file in your favorite editor and look for the following section:

/usr/Macromedia_CPS/logs/out.log /usr/Macromedia_CPS/logs/err.log true true true

By default the logger is only set to show error messages. This section also shows the location of the error logs and the output logs.

Note, that enabling this you will get larger log files, since this will log all connections to the LDAP server by the Contribute client(s) that you have installed. You may find it necessary to open the admin console and set a max log file size to control this.