I knew it was bound to happen. I released the software one day, and the next I began getting bug reports. Which was great! I hope it continues. It means you’re using it.

Here you will find a comprehensive list of all the bugs submitted for Oddbook. In every case, I have either fixed the problem or provided a work-around. Also, I think credited each person responsible for bringing the issues to my attention, but if I’ve missed you for some reason, be sure to let me know.

Ongoing Issues:
Security Alert/Redirect

Resolved Issues:
Broken CSS, Escaped Single Quotes Are Displayed, Disappearing Text and Links, Error in fgets() function, Admin Navigation, HTML Template

Ongoing Issues

Issue 1: Security Alert/Redirect

If you have PHP complied as a CGI module on your server, you may get this error whenever you click any of the links on Oddbook. The error will looks something like this:

Security Alert! PHP CGI cannot be accessed directly.

This PHP CGI binary was compiled with force-cgi-redirect enabled. This means that a page will only be served up if the REDIRECT_STATUS CGI variable is set. This variable is set, for example, by Apache’s Action directive redirect [...]

Though this seems problematic, we should be thankful that someone has security in mind when they are administering Apache. Also, I have a workaround, which goes like this:

• from the directory in which you have your oddbook.php file, open the file includes/ob_vars.inc
• in that file, go to the line that reads:
  $thisfile = getenv("SCRIPT_NAME")
• edit the value of $thisfile and set it to whatever the file name of your main Oddbook file is. Be sure to include the root directory as well. So it looks something like this:
  $thisfile="/path/to/oddbook.php"
• save the file and refresh the page in your browser.

[ thanks, Greg ]

Resolved Issues

Issue 6: Broken CSS

Because Oddbook depends on the PATH_INFO CGI variable to pass information to the server, the @import command in the oddbook.php file is broken most, if not all, of the time. To solve this problem, I have removed the @import command entirely, and included the contents of the ob_style.css on the server.

[ Thanks, Will ]

Issue 5: Escaped Single Quotes Are Displayed

With some versions of PHP, the magic_quotes_gpc value is not set, and as a result text with escaped single quotes (i.e., \') will be displayed. I have added a stripslashes() function, which will resolve the issue.

[ Thanks, Jay ]

Issue 4: Disappearing Text and Links

A bug in the SQL statements causes information not to be displayed on the individual entry pages of the application. An itemized list of problems follows:

• When clicking links to individual entries (i.e., clicking the two colons that appear after the book’s title), the user is taken to a page that is missing both the entire current URL, which breaks the permalinks for the page. Clicking on the link then leads to PHP error [ thanks, Lee ]
• Also, when following the same links to individual entries, the text of the review disappears when the page is displayed [ I found this one ]

Issue 3: Error in fgets() function

For those running older versions of PHP, (pre-4.2.0), the oddbook.php page will throw an error that reads Wrong parameter count for fgets() -- which has been resolved by adding the second parameter.

(For the more technically-minded: in PHP versions 4.2.0 and later, the length parameter of the fgets() function became optional.)

[ Thanks, Greg ]

Issue 2: Admin Navigation

The bugs in this section hinder or break the navigation in the administration section of the application.

• the books.php file in the admin/ section of the application should be renamed to index.php in order to prevent the admin/ directory from being exposed [ thanks, Will ]
• the books.php file in the admin/ section contains an erroneous link to a file named booklist that will result in a 404 error [ thanks, Will ]

Issue 1: HTML Template

The HTML template has a series of bugs, most of them cosmetic, that might confuse the user after installing the software. An itemized list follows:

• the text jessamyn.info is hard-coded into the the title of the oddbook.php page [ thanks, Will ]
• the sidebar of the oddbook.php page has two links to JavaScript functions that are not included with the Oddbook application. They throw an error when clicked [ I found this one ]

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