How I fixed a problem with Rapidweaver Preview in Foundation and EasyCMS/TotalCMS

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For anyone using EasyCMS or TotalCMS who has problems with Rapidweaver Preview.

I’ve spent the last 10 days wrestling with a problem where Rapidweaver Preview would either fail to load completely (I’d see a blank screen) or I’d get the wrong page showing instead. Previewing in a browser from RW didn’t help either. Everything was working fine in live but I was nervous about doing any updates in these projects as I would be working blind not being able to preview the results in any way.

This happened only on a couple of my projects, one using EasyCMS and the other TotalCMS Blog. Every other project I have was working fine including some with EasyCMS and TotalCMS.

This hadn’t always been the case as Preview worked fine when I was building these sites. Obviously something had changed to render Preview inactive in these two projects but what?

The common feature of the two projects was that they were both hosted on a shared hosting package at 123Reg. Naturally I rang 123Reg technical support but they couldn’t see anything wrong with the hosting package and blamed Rapidweaver.

I noticed that in one of the two projects, one page that only had a single EasyCMS controlled text stack did preview so on Joe’s suggestion I did a series of tests in another project on the same shared hosting, adding some EasyCMS controlled content and sure enough this broke the RW preview after the third EasyCMS content stack had been added.

To cut a long story short I have now moved the TotalCMS Blog site to another host: Siteground.co.uk where everything is now working perfectly. (I’m based in the UK).

I hesitate to endorse a hosting company after such a short time and only one site but I have already noticed several benefits over my previous hosting company.

  1. I wish I had measured loading speeds before moving but my site on Siteground’s hosting appears visually to be a lot faster.

  2. Siteground offer PHP level 7.0.17 as a default whereas my previous host just about managed 5.6, the minimum requirement for Total CMS.

  3. Siteground offer a free SSL certificate. I had to pay for my last one.

  4. The speed of response to my support queries via a support ticket and the helpfulness of the answers has been impressive.

I still don’t know what the actual cause of the problem was but I hope this info may be of help to someone.

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