I must say that I am very pleased with what I am seeing in 2.1beta3. After a decade with previous iterations of SMF, it will indeed remain my favorite forum community platform. If the bridge issues could ever be solved without intense debate--all would be perfect!
In any event, the only issue I have run into so far in fully setting up the site concerns a behavior that seems to carry across all of the various configuration screens--but occasionally disappears in a panel and function is normal. What am I rambling on about, you ask? When clicking on the 'Save' button after making config changes, I am VERY often greeted by a download screen inviting me to save index.php to a folder on my local workstation!
Clicking cancel of course makes that go away--and interestingly the changes are committed to the database successfully, even though no green "saved' bar appears at the top of the config panel. As I said, it does not always do this, and sometimes completes the save routine normally.
Any others seen this--or have thoughts as to what the situation might be and how to remedy it? 8)
that is typically a HOST-side issue with the php processor
You might want to try renaming ".htaccess" to something with a different name. Or copy and then rename. It was too long ago for me to remember but this is a -good- idea, not necessarily a 'fix'.
I'm not messing too much with "my php.ini". But I have come to the understanding that the Apache-php connection requires experience and insight.
And what Kindred said. I am really no programmer.
I was experiencing same issue a while ago but it just disappeared. The only thing i can think of is that I reset my php.ini and again updated all the configuration.
This happens to some users once in a while. It appears to happen to Firefox users most frequently.
Try another browser.
Try clearing cache.
If using Trend Micro, read their fix on their support site.
If it happens to all users, there are some apache level settings that may need to be tweaked....
Thanks everyone for the replies--but no resolution. I can find nothing in the Trend Micro support archives detailing any configuration fixed. I updated (by domain) the PHP version to 7, and set basic configurations. No resolution. Reverted back to 5.6. The behavior varies by the browser. Chrome is totally unworkable. Edge is not much better. Firefox is a nuisance, but at least I can log in. Every time it wants to download the index.php file instead of executing the command process for logging in or saving something. Out of curiosity, I set up a parallel version of SMF in version 2.0.14 in another directory. Same stuff. What is interesting is that I ran a SMF 2.0.9 forum for nearly two years under the same server with the same configurations with no issues.
The .htacess file has been dumped. Both Apache and my VPS container rebooted several times after configs. And yes, I clear browser caches between experiments. Right now, I have no way to put any version of SMF into production. Does anyone know the specific edits to the php.ini file that makes this behavior go away? If not, I have to scrap SMF and consider a Xenforo install--as this is a client development that needs to go to production and I cannot hold off whilst dabbling around with whatever has changed between 2.0.9 and all of the later configurations in how they are dealing with PHP.
As a side note, there are no problems with multiple Wordpress, Joomla, or Moodle installs that live in various domain accounts on my VPS server. Just SMF... :-[
If it is impacting all users, not just you, my bet is apache settings. This is very unusual for SMF, I don't think anything fundamental changed in the code. Nothing in index.php says, "download me, don't execute me".
Lots of articles out there with a few solutions to try:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18422140/apache-is-downloading-php-files-instead-of-displaying-them
https://forums.cpanel.net/forums/general-discussion.5/
This one shows how htacces directives might cause an issue:
https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/158489/moved-wordpress-to-new-server-now-tries-to-download-a-file
Hope this helps...