At long last, Adobe has released a hotfix for a number of serious issues affecting the PHP MySQL server model in Dreamweaver 8.0.2. Unfortunately, you can’t just go to the Adobe site and download it. You need to contact Adobe support and ask for it. Officially, the reason is because Adobe wants to know how many people have been affected by the problems that it solves, and it wants to check that the solution “works for them”.
Anybody using my book Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 should get the hotfix pronto, as it solves two problems affecting Chapters 9 and 12:
- Without the hotfix, Dreamweaver 8.0.2 strips CONCAT() out of SQL queries.
- Changes in the way PHP 5.1.4 and above handles XML resulted in the XSL Transformatiion server behavior reporting incorrectly that the source was not a valid XML document.
The hotfix also solves a couple of other important problems, so if you have Dreamweaver 8.0.2 or have been putting off updating to 8.0.2, I strongly urge you to get in touch with Adobe support and get the hotfix. You can find full details in this technote on the Adobe site.
Just now I contacted Adobe support for the hotfix.
First problem in the form was the DW version. I had to choose 8.0.1. There was no option for 8.0.2.
A major annoyance is the site being in mixed languages for non-English visitors. When I chose my country (Holland) I was first redirected to a Dutch page and next I was redirected to the actual form page, which is in English again. English is no problem, but it’s very sloppy, especially for a site with such expensive products that are sold worldwide.
And I mentioned my version number (8.0.2) in the textfield area, but I hope they notice it.
I’ll just have to wait and see if they’ll send it, I guess.
Marianne
I’m sorry to hear about that, Marianne. I was involved in testing the hotfix (mainly because I reported several of the bugs it addresses), so have no direct experience of the way it is being distributed. Let me know if you have any more problems. I can’t guarantee that it will have any effect, but I’ll pass on your observations to my contacts at Adobe.
I had a look at the technotes page shown above, but could not for the life of me find any suitable link to even ask for the fixt to be mailed to me. Does anyone have an actual link?
Joss
Further to my previous post… I found a way to contact Adobe on this issue, but I have to say this is an extremely painful process and certainly far, far below Adobe’s previous standards.
I’ll just have to wait and see if they actually do send the fix to me.
BTW, thanks David for the great books which I enjoy immensely – and reference regularly!!
Joss
I recently came across the bug, and have need of the hotfix too. I have been trying for over 2 weeks to contact Adobe support with no success whatsoever. David, I just emailed you for help, and thought I would post here as well.
If anyone can just send me the file, I’d appreciate it. Adobe is making it far too complicated to get this fix. Why should this fix be different than any other in the way it’s distributed? Maddening.
Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
Michael.
Sorry about the problems, Michael. I have written to a contact inside Adobe to see if this mess can be sorted out once and for all.
Thanks David, I will look forward to seeing if they’ll respond at all. They haven’t responded to any of my efforts to contact technical support. I really enjoy Adobe products, but as I’ve experienced it, their support is terrible. The cynical side of me says that this is what we should expect from an industry-standard company who just bought one of their key competitors…why offer good support when there’s no real competitive alternative? (But that’s just the cynical side…I do have another more hopeful side too…
).
Good book on PHP/Dreamweaver btw! I bought it retail after reading comments on Amazon. thanks David.
I found the info on the CONCAT issue by burrowing into the forum on Friends of Ed ( i was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what I could be doing wrong).
Could you post this rewrite problem and the potential fix on the Friends of Ed download section for the book? I’ve worked around the problem just by modifying the source code.
I’ve also downloaded the updated example files but there doesn’t appear any documentation with them describing what difference there is between the “old” files and why. If some could be provided, I’d really appreciate it!
Glad you like the book, Mario. The information about CONCAT has been on the book’s updates and corrections page for many months. In fact, it went up there just a few days after the release of Dreamweaver 8.0.2. The difference between the updated files and the original ones is also explained. The original files are for Dreamweaver 8.0.0 and 8.0.1. The updated ones use the code created by Dreamweaver 8.0.2.
Since there has been a lot of controversy about the 8.0.2 updater, many people have not updated (although that’s not an option for anyone buying Dreamweaver in the past few months). As a result, I have asked friends of ED to provide both versions. You will find an explanation of the differences on the updates page I’ve linked to earlier. There’s also an updates page elsewhere on this site.
Hope that clears things up for you.
After a pain in the a** attempt to contact Adobe about the issue I was finally “allowed†to ask for the update. Several weeks later, I was graced with this response.
†Hello Phil,
Thank you for contacting Adobe Customer Service. For your records your
Customer ID is 115183298.
All available updates for Dreamweaver 8 are located at
http://www.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/downloads_updaters.html
For more information on Adobe® products or services please visit us at:
http://www.adobe.com or contact Adobe customer services at 1 (800)
833-6687. Customer Service Representatives are available 6:00am-8:00pm
PST, 7 days a week. Please reference your Customer ID for quicker
service.
Thank you,
Marci G.â€
Obviously, it is not on the regular updater site or I would not be asking support for it.
This is quite frankly unacceptable. I have tried contacting people directly involved with Dreamweaver inside Adobe, but got no reply, either. I’ll try again.
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Hi, Phil. I hope that you have now received the PHP hotfix directly from my contact in Adobe. I stirred up a little debate in a private forum, and hopefully Adobe will finally get its act together on this. More details here together with advice for anyone else trying to get the hotfix.
The fix can be downloaded here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/ts/documents/b6c2ae2a/DW802_HotFix-0_6_0.zip
Thanks, Caedmon. Rather than download the ZIP file directly. I suggest that people use the link that I gave in my original post and follow-ups: http://www.adobe.com/go/b6c2ae2a. That takes you to the Adobe technote with details of the problems that the hotfix corrects. It’s always a good idea to read technotes first because any changes will be listed there, whereas they might for be reflected here.
Very Happy owner of PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web design made easy. Great book, i’ve already started adapting the sample code to suit my needs.
One query though. Chp 5, Contact10.php
If i tab into the Comments Text field, i dont get the text cursor at the start but about 20 characters in, which means i have to hold backspace for a while before i can type from the start. if there a quick fix?
sorry if this is not the right place to be asking questions, but i didnt know how else to contact you. thanks for your time.
liam
It means that you have a gap between the opening and closing textarea tags in the underlying XHTML. The tags must have no whitespace inbetween, although you can put PHP code there. Make sure there is no whitespace between the textarea tags and the opening and closing PHP tags.