"Succss! Omeka is installed" page keeps coming up

I recently installed Omeka on my server. when I click on my website, about 9 out of 10 times (or more) the website takes me to the page that says “Success! Omeka is Installed,” instead of taking me to my page. Then again, if I keep clicking, it might eventually take me to my page, allow me to work in it for a while, then randomly, I’ll click on another tab or link, such as “Users” or “Add a new collection” and it will randomly take me back to the “Success!” page.

Any ideas on what may be causing this?

Not sure what the underlying cause might be, but it sounds like there’s something odd going on with the database. Basically, Omeka tries to get data from the options table in the database with every load, and if it fails for some reason, Omeka interprets that as it not being installed and redirects to the install page. Then, my guess is that a slightly different check makes it see that it is in fact installed, leaving you on that page.

At least that’s my best guess about what’s happening. But it leaves the mystery of why the database query is sometimes fine and sometimes fails.

So, to check and diagnose, if you can get a server admin to see if there are errors showing up in the apache and/or MySQL logs as an error when Omeka queries the options table, that might help track down the underlying cause. It might end up being something as simple as repairing the database tables.

Another option if you want to modify some of the core code is to first follow these instructions for turning on error reporting. Then, go into the Omeka files and dig down to application/libraries/Omeka/Application/Resource/Options.php and find this line:


private $_installerRedirect = true;

and change it to

private $_installerRedirect = false;

Then browse around your site to reproduce the problem. That should then give an error message that you can copy here for us to look at.