Unable to authenticate user
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I recently installed the latest PhpGedView on my GoDaddy hosted domain using a MySQL database.
I successfully uploaded my GEDCOM file and created an admin user and password and a read-only user and password.
After logging in to the site several times I now get an "Unable to authenticate user" message for both users.
I have no trouble logging into the database with phpMyAdmin using the same admin username/password.
The only previous thread on a similiar issue is from 2003 and pertains to setting up new accounts, not on the admin account.
Any ideas or suggestions on what additional information I need to provide?
John Bales
Last edit: John Wayland Bales 2016-09-23
Which "latest" version did you install? You should be using the SVN (AKA 4.3.0) version.
It sounds as if your database has been corrupted or somebody has hacked your site and changed the config.php file so that PhpGedView can't access the database.
Authentication is done by way of the database. The pgv_user table controls the password check, and the pgv_user_setting table controls the rights, etc. of each user.
Check to see that the config.php file contains the expected information, and that the database tables are present and contain information about your users. We'll proceed from there.
I am using PhpGedView-basid-4.2.4 which is the latest version available from SourceForge.com.
The config.php file contains my correct admin username and password. The pgv_user table contains my correct username and a hashed password. The pgv_user_setting table has canadmin set to Y. Some of the tables are empty including the pgv_user_gedcom_setting table for instance.
John ... starting point is to switch to 4.3.0 version from the SVN on SF ... we are unable to update the files area of SF with a more current version, but we can update the SVN service. You need the later version becuase anything earlier needs old versions of PHP to work reliably.
As Lester says, there's nobody who has enough authority to replace the severely outdated version 4.2.4 with the most recent SVN version. The project admin and almost all of the developers have gone to Webtrees. We can only keep the SVN repository more-or-less current. SourceForge Support is of no help at all -- they insist that a project admin (of which there are none) should contact them. Everybody else is just chopped liver.
Originally, Webtrees was a clone of PhpGedView. I can't say how similar to PhpGedView the current version of Webtrees is.
If you're just starting out with PhpGedView, I would advise you to use Webtrees instead. Webtrees has a very active support organization and a strong user community. PhpGedView is in "maintenance" mode, and fixes to problems are made only for severe problems.
If you insist on using PhpGedView, look at some of the recent Help posts. There's enough information there to get you started on the SVN version.
Gerry, I came to the same conclusion. After some online research I decided to use webtrees instead. A new version came out just a few days ago. I had not done anything so far with phpgedview except upload my GEDCOM file and add a couple of dates and images so starting over with webtrees will not mean redoing lots of work.
Thank you Gerry and Lester for your responses.
Actually, just export the GEDCOM from PGV and import it into webtrees, and you won't lose any of your work!