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I’m having trouble getting Total CMS to register. I continue to receive a red banner at the bottom of the page saying “Could not communicate with Total CMS. Either you have not published your project yet, or your website address is not properly set”

I’ve checked online in the forum, and tried some of the other solutions, but still have this problem.

My steps were as follows:

Created a new Stack page and drag in the Total CMS Admin Core. Then add a CMS Blog List under the Core Stack. I change the Blog List CMS ID to a unique ID (“BPID”).

I then created a new Stack page and drag in the Total CMS Content: “Text”. I changed the CMS ID to the same unique ID (BPID).

I then go back to the Admin Core and preview the page. When it prompts for my domain, I type in “www.bpengineers.net”. I also type in my serial number. The domain is different from the Rapidweaver General setting, which is “https://www.bpengineers.net/”, but the Total CMS Registration won’t allow me to type in “https://”, or a “/” at the end of the address. When I add either of these (or both) to the domain, nothing happens when I click Register. If I remove the “https://” and the “/” at the end of the address, it allows me to click the register button, and says thank you. I then published the website, and turn off the “thumbs up" button in the Admin Core Registration settings… but when I come back to the preview page, it continues to give me the same error message “could not communicate with Total CMS…”.

I also tried adding the serial number to the Admin Core “License” field, but that didn’t seem to change anything.

One other thing to note, there is a path setup in the Publishing settings, “public_html”, and I tried to add this to the Total CMS Admin Core Registration Domain, “htpps://www.bpengineers.net/public_html”, but again, nothing happens when I click the Register button. It seems to not respond when there is a “/” in the domain path.

Any help would be appreciated.

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Hi Josh, there are many thing going wrong there. Did you eventually watch the video(s) how to properly set up TCMS? The older videos are at the bottom here: Total CMS Stack for RapidWeaver

You have to add a CMS Core stack to the content page and an Admin Core stack to the admin page. In both you have to put in your serial number.

Since TCMS allows you to use any subdomain besides your regular domain you just type bpengineers.net as the domain, nothing more. This setup then also works with www.bpengineers.net or dev.pbengineers.net etc.
And forget about that “public_html” thing. Just simply make sure that your site is published to the correct folder on your hosting server, so that the pages generally work (with or without TCMS).

In the steps you described that you put a CMS Blog List on the admin side and gave it an ID. Ok, but then you say you put just a Text stack on the content side with the same ID. That cannot work. Either you also use a Text stack on the admin side (since you obviously only want to use a text field) or you drag a Blog List stack on the content side, so that you get a blog. Just take care that the IDs are the same on the content and admin stacks. And only use the orange stacks for the admin side and the white stacks for the content side.

If you take care of all this your setup should work just fine. Hope that helps you a bit…

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Hi Mathias,

Thank your for the help… I’ve rewatched several videos, and with your help, I’m starting to understand the concepts better.

I’ve modified my pages as follows:

  1. Admin Page
    a. Admin Core
    b. Admin Text with CMSID: CMSText
  2. Content Page
    a. CMS Core
    b. Content Text with CMSID: CMSText

I’m trying to keep it simple at first, and have removed everything else from the CMS pages. (ie. blog lists, images, etc.)

I’ve republished the entire website. After doing this, when I preview the Admin page inside Rapidweaver, I still get the error “Could not communicate with Total CMS. Either you have not published your project yet, or your website address is not properly set.”

Checking with Weaver’s Space, my license is registered with “bpengineers.net”, so that seems to be good on their end, and that’s what’s setup in Rapidweaver.

When I go to my website, and visit the either the Admin or Content page, I receive the following error: “Internal Server Error: The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request”. If I view the server log file, there are multiple lines with the same error: PHP Fatal error: Directive ‘asp_tags’ is no longer available in PHP"

I have Rapidweaver setup to run PHP 7.4.21. My website hosting company says it supports PHP 7.4 (if I drill down into the details, it looks like it is specifically running 7.4.10) I don’t know if this might be causing the errors?

I’m not sure where the error is coming from at this point. Again, I appreciate any help and insight you might provide.

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Hi Josh,

as far as I know Total CMS needs at least PHP8.0 (better 8.1). PHP7.4 is outdated for years and nobody should use this any more due to security risks. Maybe the error(s) you are seeing result from that issue. So ask your hosting provider to change your setting to PHP8.1 or do this yourself in your hosting backend area / cpanel.

Maybe it would also make sense to have a look at the demo project files provided here: Total CMS Stack for RapidWeaver

Regarding the setup you described above: yep, that looks good meanwhile. :wink: Remember you can put as much text stacks on the content and admin side as you want. You could then name them CMSText1, CMSText2 etc. or maybe use names that are more recognizable, like about-us-introtext or footer-left-column and so on. Just take care that the cms-ID is the same on the content side and on the admin side.

Best, Matthias

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