2007 May 06 - Sun

I Hate PHP on a database call.

I think this is the second time I've been caught on this. And I should have recalled the second time around to check this.

I'm working through the process of installing and playing with Movable Type. It went quite well. Configuration and maintenance and adding content worked well. Well, up until I decided to enable Dynamic Content generation. Then I found out Movable Type has two faces, a Perl one and a PHP one.

To handle dynamic content, they do an Apache redirect/rewrite through a default php script, one that does a database call. And in order to do the databae call, it opens a connection to the database.

I'm testing with PostgreSQL. My Debian install didn't have, by default, the php4-pgsql package. If it isn't installed, PHP simply aborts somewhere in the code, quietly. How silly. No errors, no messages, no nothing.

So after untold 'echo()' statements later, I tracked it down to a call in the ezsql implementation. Finally the light bulb went on over my head. The fix:

apt-get install php4-pgsql

I'm wondering if there is a way to test for this package, so I don't forget this again.

I probably didn't clue into this before because the main Movable Type scripts are in Perl and use the database connections there. I made the, obviously incorrect assumption, that the PHP scripts were involved and already knew about the database driver. Well, I was incorrect on that one.