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Troubleshooting Techniques

This page concerns phpList self-hosted users only. If you have a registered account at the phpList Hosted service, please contact hosted@phpList.com.

This page gives you some hints on how to troubleshoot a problem in phpList. 

Where to go first

The first place to go for help is phpList.org, especially phpList.org/users - this page has the most up-to-date list of support resources and will guide you through the process of getting help step by step.

Describing your problem

One of the biggest barriers to problem solving is being able to describe the problem clearly and in enough detail. There is a useful article here to help you with that - it's especially worth a read if you are "not very technical".

Enable error reporting

Verbose phpList logging

You can tell phpList to log more information about all its behaviour by enabling verbose mode in your config.php file:

define('VERBOSE', true);

Then check the following page for logged events, such as generating messages for sending: System -> Log of Events.

PHP Error reporting

By default phpList has error reporting disabled. This behaviour will even suppress errors and exceptions from appearing in your web server's logs.

To enable error reporting, change the following files:

  1. public_html/lists/admin/index.php
  2. public_html/lists/admin/init.php

From:

error_reporting(0)

to

error_reporting(1)

Even more error output

If the above doesn't show you the clues you're looking, add these to your config.php file for maximum output verbosity (warning: don't try this on a production website; it will likely add potentially sensitive debugging text to your phpList web pages):

xdebug_enable();
$GLOBALS['show_dev_errors'] = true;
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$developer_email = 'your@email-address.com';
$GLOBALS['show_dev_errors'] = true;

If you have an error message

If you have an error message, try pasting it into a search engine. All our forums and documentation are fully indexed by search engines, and your solution is likely to pop up in the results.

Don't give up!

If you have a problem that is hard to solve, it could be a "bug." In this case, take a look at the bug reporting process described on the community site - our developer team may be able to fix your problem in the next version.

Feedback

Discuss this chapter here.

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