"published" field reverts to default

traviscox

Greetings,

I am attempting to move from a static to dynamic site but have run into a small problem that defies my understanding.

I am using the database structure for a news site from "PHP and MySQL Web Development" by Luke Welling and Laura Thompson. It uses a file "publish.php" to alter the status of a record from published (and therefore appearing) to unpublished (and therefore not appearing).

While the publish.php function works fine, and the pages all seem to be responding as they should, with published records appearing, during the past month, on two occasions, all records have suddenly reverted to "0" in the "published" field. That is, they change to being unpublished documents, which renders the site completely useless because nobody can see anything.

I can go and re-publish them all, which I did the first time because I thought perhaps I had done something somehow. I was not sure how I could have, since one day it was working, and when I checked again two days later, everything was unpublished.

It's happened again though, and I've no desire to go re-publish the entire database again. I'd rather solve the problem and find out why it could be happening.

Has anyone else experienced this? Or am I all alone in the wilderness? I can't seem to find any other instances of this occurring but perhaps someone can offer some assistance.

In essence, what sort of occurrence might cause the entire database to be unaffected except for one field reverting to the default?

steadyguy

That book happens to be collecting dust on my shelf ... so I brushed it off, loaded up the stuff from the CD ...

Code is hard enough to go through if you're not the one who wrote it - but this is stuff is really broken up, into a logic that is really foreign to me ... in any case, the only thing I could think of is that maybe you tried to 'unpublish' a story. Because of the way they have the script set up, you could easily unpublish them all instead of just one. If that's not the case, I dunno ...

Also, I noticed that the script relies on register_globals which you might want to avoid using - it opens your site up to all kinds of attacks.

traviscox

Steadyguy,

Thanks for your prompt response. I agree that the code in the book is broken up into a lot of different snippets, although I found that to be somewhat useful in deciphering what did what. On the other hand, trying to figure out how they all worked together was a little more complex, I admit.

I am a little stumped by your comment that it would be possible to unpublish all records, not just one. Is there a line in the code that is wrong, or can you read "between the lines" so to speak a little better than me and see larger problems? My reading of the code indicates that whether publishing or unpublishing, it would be only one record affected, not all.

Is it possible to explain that further for me, or is it just, say, a vibe you pick up from the code and there's not an easy line to point at and say "see, there is the problem"?

Thanks for any light you can help shed on the matter.

steadyguy

In the unpublish function, they set the SQL to something like UPDATE stories SET 'publish'=NULL WHERE story=$story or something like that ... Theoretically, it should only unpublish one story, and not all of them, but because of the way SQL in general works, without the WHERE clause - or a WHERE clause that evaluates to TRUE for all stories - it will unpublish all the stories.

This does seem a bit unlikely ... BUT ... two things make it possible: firstly, the script's reliance on register_globals (a bad idea, actually - as it is quite insecure), and secondly, it doesn't check to make sure that the variables are even set, much less if they contain appropriate values.

I could be wrong: it could be something else, but based on a quick look at the source code, this stuck out as the most eligible candidate for an explanation to your problem.