evil 'white screen' in Package Manager on new install (fatal PHP error)

[ArrEff]

Background: older SMF installation with numerous mods, upgraded several times to the current 1.1.9.  First install of TP 1.0 beta 4.  Apache 2.2.11, PHP 5.2.8, MySQL 5.1.30.

Everything appeared to work flawlessly after the TP install until I hit the 'Packages' link in the Admin panel.  Oops.  PHP 'white screen of death', no output.  Nothing in the forum error log, no PHP error log files, nothing in the cPanel error log.  Oh, joy, it's a bug hunt!

It turns out that I'd caused this error myself when I was locking the shared host down with some simple security measures.  HostGator *enables* magic_quotes on ALL of their shared accounts, and the only way to disable that flaw was to create a php.ini file and insert a disable in it.  While I was looking around at other security measures I could take, I disabled allow_url_fopen (which I see is causing forum error messages with TP) and I set the memory_limit = 8m.  Surprise!!  With TP installed, that 8meg script memory limit gets exceeded when you enter the Package Manager!  Simply increasing the memory_limit to 9m eliminated the error.  I moved it up to 12meg just in case...

This isn't a bug, I'm merely alerting anyone with a low memory_limit to check the Packages link after install.  It's rather hard to uninstall TinyPortal when you can't even get INTO the Package Manager due to low memory errors that happen AFTER the install. 

[ZarPrime]

Disabling url fopen prevents rss feeds from working.  Even if you don't have any other ones, there is an RSS feed right in the TP Admin area that causes those errors when fopen is disabled.  As for memory, I highly recommend 16 MB or more but that's just what I use and it works fine.

ZarPrime

[Skhilled]

I'm sure this will help some users, especially those who are hosted with HostGator and other hosting companies who have the same server settings/restrictions.

But this depends on how the server is configured and IF the hosting company will allow you to use a custom php.ini file. Some do not and will shut you down if you try. Please check with your hosting first before trying this to avoid any problems with them.