styles.css path is wrong for plugins on windows

[Matt Gibson]

Using Mahara 1.2.6 on Windows XP and MySQL. Debugging using Firebug

The paths returned by $THEME->get_url() include use of DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR in the middle of a URL, which doesn't work.

The line caling it is 1029 of /artefact/form/elements/filebrowser.php:

        $pluginsheets = $THEME->get_url('style/style.css', true, 'artefact/file');

And the function causing the problem is get_path() on line 697 of /ib/web.php, which can be fixed by altering line 699 to this:

        $plugindirectory = ($plugindirectory && substr($plugindirectory, -1) != '/') ? $plugindirectory . '/' : $plugindirectory;

Original line 699:

        $plugindirectory = ($plugindirectory && substr($plugindirectory, -1) != DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR) ? $plugindirectory . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR : $plugindirectory;

[Andrew Nicols (dobedobedoh)]

Correct file is /artefact/file/form/elements/filebrowser.php

[Andrew Nicols (dobedobedoh)]

Matt,

Can you provide an example URL which demonstrates this issue.
E.g. going to /index.php when logged in causes the site_logo.png to not be displayed because of this issue.
In my installation, DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR is set to '/' so this test does work.

Andrew

[Andrew Nicols (dobedobedoh)]

DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR is a predefined constant - http://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.constants.php
Not sure what it's defined as under Windows XP.

Matt - what version of php are you running?

[Matt Gibson (matt-inaura)]

Hi Andrew,

I'm running PHP 5.3.1 and on Windows, the DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR is a backslash, leading to URLs like this within the HTML markup:

http://maharapod.localhost/artefact/file\theme/default/static/style/style.css

which don't resolve, e.g. when you visit http://mahara.localhost/artefact/file/index.php where Firebug shows that the above url hasn't resolved to a file, leaving the page without some of its styling.

[Andrew Nicols (dobedobedoh)]

I've not got a Windows VM running with php at present to fully verify or test patches against, but I see how this could well be the case.

_get_path is used by both get_path and get_url.
I believe php under windows will correctly handle use of forward slashes (/) in a path so this shouldn't cause issues for windows paths.

Since DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR expands to / on linux and I think to both \ and / on windows, it probably does make sense to just replace DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR with / in this case -- any plugin using a trailing backslash (\) as a directory separator in the plugindirectory would only work under Windows and not Linux anyway. It's only get_path that could be adversely affected by this change and only under windows.

I'll leave this to someone with a Windows dev environment to hand unless I get a chance to get one up and running today.

[François Marier (fmarier)]

We should grep the codebase for DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR and look at stripping them out.

Perhaps updating the developer documentation would be good as well (making a note that we should just always use POSIX paths).

[François Marier (fmarier)]

Let's replace the DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR in Mahara with forward slashes.

Ideally we should also suggest the same thing to Dwoo's upstream and/or submit patches.