Articles issues with upgrade

We’ve just upgraded Articles from 1.7.12 to 1.8.0. It was running on Modx 2.8.1. The ‘Close’ button no longer functions on the individual article page. We upgraded that to 2.8.3 to see if it would help (we’re not ready for Modx 3 yet). It hasn’t helped.
The issues are:

The ‘Close’ button on an individual article doesn’t work and gives a console error

update.js:89 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'formpanel')
    at MODx.Component.cancel (update.js:89:41)
    at S.onClick (ext-all.js:21:426947)
    at HTMLSpanElement.I (ext-all.js:21:57750)

The error log constantly spits out:

[2022-05-12 14:59:43] (ERROR @ /home/p4p/public_html/core/xpdo/xpdo.class.php : 1656) Could not load class ArticlesContainer!
[2022-05-12 14:59:43] (ERROR @ /home/p4p/public_html/core/xpdo/xpdo.class.php : 644) Could not load class: ArticlesContainer from mysql.articlescontainer.
[2022-05-12 14:59:43] (ERROR @ /home/p4p/public_html/core/xpdo/xpdo.class.php : 762) ArticlesContainer::load() is not a valid static method.

Trying to roll back to the previous version of Articles doesn’t work. This comes up with an error alert box regarding ‘Could not install package with signature…’

Also worrying, when upgrading Modx itself, on the front end all the Articles container pages disappear, and disappear from the menus. Although Articles 1.8.0 is still in the packages list and active, we’ve had to click to reinstall to recover.

Before we start blindly thrashing about trying to fix this, has anyone else had these issues and could point us in the right direction?

I don’t think the error log stuff is relevant.

Did you try manually deleting all files in the core\cache directory and visiting in Incognito mode? If it still happens, that would rule out cache and cookie issues.

How are you getting to the individual article page (for example Manager Articles > right-click on article - edit)?

Thanks for the reply, Bob. Manually deleting core/cache and viewing in Incognito mode still produces the Console log error above.
To navigate to the Articles, we’re going Resource tree → click on Articles container page, clcik ‘Edit’ on a page from the Articles list.

Another strange thing is that when editing an individual articles page, there’s normally just ‘Article Title’, ‘Summary’ & ‘Content’ editable fields on the first tab. Since the update, we now also have the ‘Description’ field too.

I haven’t seen the MODX 3 version. Does it still say “Manage Articles” when you right-click on the articles container and then show you the Articles grid? Is that how you’re getting to the edit panel for an article?

Yes, that’s correct.
Modx is on 2.8.3-pl on this particular site.
With the console error coming on click of the ‘Close’ button, we wondered if the JS had changed. We have an old copy of the same site used for dev running on 2.8.1 with Articles 1.7.12. No rogue Description window or console error on the ‘Close’ button on that site - all works. Comparing the files ext-all.js and update.js on the ‘formpanel’ error shows the js files to be identical on both versions. Button HTML looks the same too.

That suggests that the Manager code has changed. Have you looked at the page source in dev. tools (the browser’s source view won’t show all the modExt stuff).

Like using ‘Inspect Element’?
All elements look pretty much a carbon copy, although below is slightly changed and /manager/assets/modext/widgets/resource/modx.grid.resource.security.js is now /manager/assets/modext/widgets/resource/modx.grid.resource.security.local.js

Some files have updated content but e.g. assets/components/articles/js/article/update.js has had updates. Is there anything specific you would look for?

I’m afraid nothing specific comes to mind.

Are there any Articles JS files that might have changed?

You should probably report this on the Articles issue page.

I’m having the same problem, the close button is not working on articles, fine on resource pages.

Bob suggested reporting the problem, but I couldn’t find any follow-up on that so I’ve reported it here Close button not working on articles · Issue #162 · modxcms/Articles · GitHub

Has anyone got a temp fix for this before the next release of Articles?

Maybe try removing the if-condition here

and the closing bracket on line 98.

This should add a second “Close” button (on the right side) that worked when I tested it.


I think somehow the code still calls the cancel function from the parent component (MODx.page.UpdateResource) and not its own.