CiviCRM News dashlet broken?

[Upperholme]

Today I've started seeing the error message "Serialization of 'SimpleXMLElement' is not allowed" on a number of the sites I look after when looking at the CivicRM News dashlet on the CiviCRM home page http://example.com/civicrm/dashboard?reset=1

As it's appearing on several sites, on different servers running different version os CivicRM, I'm guessing the problem may well be with the source, and not with my end.

Certainly had me confused this morning when providing a tour of CiviCRM to a prospective client, and the first thing they saw was a bright yellow error message!

[groston]

Same problem here - I think this may be related to the update to 4.5.2. The site seems to work properly, just the home page is broken.

[cfusch]

Upperholme,

Dunno if this is related, but when I did my last upgrade and went to my CiviCRM dashboard, I got the spinners that lasted for what seemed to be forever, and dashlets that were incorrect, along with some burps.

Looking at your CiviCRM homepage link, I noticed there is not a 'www' in the link.  Try refreshing the site by re-entering the the URL with the 'www' and if all goes well, then this could be the source of the problem. 

The fix for the problem (in my case) is to change the .htaccess to use either 'www' or not with 'www' via an uncomment to a redirect slug of code.  I know, we don't like that, and it will be necessary to backup the .htaccess before any further drupal updates because it writes-over the .htaccess. 

Look to the .htaccess lines between 85-100 and UNcomment the redirect, such that the path will be held regardless of www or not.

Hope this solves the problem.

Carl

[Upperholme]

Thanks cfusch. I'm pretty sure that the sites I looked at when i wrote the post already have this redirect in place in the .htaccess file, and that this marries up with the base URL set in the CiviCRM config.

It's the fact that I saw the issue appearing at around the same time on several sites running different versions of CiviCRM that gave me cause to assume that the issue wasn't at my end.

[groston]

I am with Upperholme - not sure that the problem is on my end. I had no issues prior to the update to 4.5.2.

I tried adding www before the domain name, but that did not resolve the issue.

The various Redirect lines are commented out in my .htaccess file. Since the problem did not exists with this .htaccess file previously, I will leave it unchanged for now.

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey there,

This is a known issue with the news feed from civicrm.org.  I'm working on a fix at the moment.

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey there,

Should be fixed now. Might have to refresh dashboard data or wait a while for the cache to reload

[Upperholme]

Thanks Michael.

[groston]

I cleared the caches and the problem was resolved. Thank you.