Trouble Shooting the Project Management Interface

"When I login, it doesn't do anything. It just dumps me back to the front door and the login box is still there. I can see the account that was created, and I entered the right login credentials..."

This is the most common problem reported, and the easiest to fix. The PHP_Users relies on cookies for determining whether someone is logged in or not. When you login, a cookie is set that tells the PMI on all subsequent pages that you are logged in. However, if that cookie fails to be set, then no page in the application will detect your proper login state.

The problem lies in the fact that cookies require that two decimals are present in any cookie domain. And when you think about it, it makes total sense. Look at it this way: if I set a cookie on someone's computer with a cookie domain of ".yahoo.com" that means whenever I visit a page in that domain, my browser will transmit that cookie data to the server. But what if a website set a cookie of ".com"? All of a sudden my personal data would be transmitted to virtually every site on the web. That is why two decimals are required. It is all about security.

Ok, what does this have to do with you? Well chances are you are running PMI off of your "localhost." You need to add an alias to your machine that is akin to "pmi.localhost" that way your cookie domains can support 2 decimals (because localhost by itself cannot). So add the alias, and make sure in pmi.conf that the $COOKIE_DOMAIN variable is set properly.