I use PHP's virtual() directive quite a lot on one of my sites, including central elements. This worked fine for
the last ~10 years -- but after upgrading (or rather moving, as it is on a new machine)
to Ubuntu 12.04 it somehow got broken.
Example setup (simplified)
To make it easier
to understand, I simplify some things (contents). So say I need a HTML fragment like <P>For further instructions, please look <A HREF='foobar'>here</P> in multiple pages. 10 years ago, I used SSI for that, so it is put into a file in a central place -- so if e.g.
the targeted URL changes, I only need
to update it in one place.
To serve multiple languages, I have Apache's MultiViews enabled -- and at $DOCUMENT_ROOT/central/ there are
the files:
foobar.html (English variant, and
the default)
foobar.html.de (German variant).
Now in
the PHP code, I simply placed:
<? virtual("/central/foobar"); ?>
and let Apache take care
to deliver
the correct language variant.
The problem
As said, this worked fine for about 10 years: German visitors got
the German variant, all others
the English (depending on their preferred language). But after upgrading
to Ubuntu 12.04, it no longer worked: Either nothing was delivered from
the virtual() command, or (in connection with framesets) it even ended up in binary gibberish.
Trying
to figure out what happens, I played with a lot of things. I first thought MultiViews was (somehow) not available anymore -- but calling http://<server>/central/foobar showed
the right variant, depending on
the configured language preferences. This also proved there was nothing wrong with file permissions.
The error.log gave no clues either (no error message thrown).
Finally, just as a "last ressort", I changed
the PHP command
to <? virtual("central/foobar.html"); ?> -- and that very same file was in fact included. So PHP's virtual() function basically worked -- but
the language dependend stuff obviously did no longer work together with it as it did before.
Of course I tried
to find some
change (most likely in PHP's virtual() command), using Google a lot, and also searching
the questions here -- unfortunately
to no avail.
Finally:
The question
Putting "design questions" aside (surely today I would design things differently -- but at least currently I miss
the time
to change that for a quite huge amount of pages): What can be done
to make it work again? I surely missed something -- but I cannot figure out what...
