Scary fluke: Sudden template name change to "1"

[joe_g]

Hi all,

I just had something scary happening (on my dev server luckily). I was working on an old project that has comparatively lots of data. ~1500 "event" pages, the event template has 30-40 fields. And I added another one, a repeater for a gallery.

Then suddenly, while working on some unrelated front end stuff the 'event' template had been rename to '1', and everything stopped working obviously. When looking at the '1' template it had all fields listed as strings, and not the usual draggable list of fields. I tried renaming it to 'event' again, but I got the prompt that 'event' was already taken. I then renamed it to 'eventa' - that worked, and could then rename it again to 'event'

Now things are back to normal, but I wonder - what happened? It can't be a keyboard slip since renaming a template needs a confirmation.......???

thanks for any insights in this mysterious matter,

j

[joe_g]

After some introspection I think I know what might have happened, I probably made the error to '=' instead of '==":

if($page->template->name='xx') {

Hope this helps someone else ?

 

[netcarver]

If you can build enough discipline in the way you write conditionals, you can avoid this by always putting the constant part first:

if ('xx' == $page->template->name) {

So if you accidentally miss an equals sign and do an assignment, you get an error from the runtime as you are trying to assign to a constant string literal.

I've tried to build this habit over the years and sometimes remember to do this - but I'm not there yet.