Installing COD – Conference Organizing Distribution by Drupal

Posted by Katy | Categories:

I recently installed COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution built with Drupal. I got this error message. Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in ..\includes\file.inc on line 958. This error happens every time I install a Drupal Distribution. I've tried various solutions but finally found the answer.

I Googled for a solution to this problem and read about several ways to fix it. I made changes to my.ini, php.ini and .htaccess files but the next time I installed a Drupal Distribution, the problem returned. I finally found the solution here: https://community.openatrium.com/issues/node/2576. The blog at bagsofspanners.wordpress.com is no longer live but I found a good article on the same topic. Thank you to Jonathan Beckett for solving a very annoying problem.

Defeating the Drupal Installation Timeout

If you have tried to install Drupal, or Open Atrium on a hosted web server, it's likely you have run into the script timeout issue I did, and have no way of changing the php.ini yourself to resolve the problem. I cheated - and this is how I did it. The error you typically get in the error log looks something like; PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in ...... I did a little digging through the code. The error is reported while running a function in file.inc that scans directories. This gets called by the install script while it's checking that required modules exist. Given that custom Drupal installs typically have A LOT of modules, it's no surprise that it might time out. There is an easy answer - comment out the line in the install script that makes the check;