So, I've been recently migrating a number of old CMS MS installations (as far
back as v1.5, if you'll believe it), and one thing consistently crops up - in
the News module, there's a number of entries which, after all the required
upgrades, end up having *_modules_news.start_time defined, and
*_modules_news.end_time = NULL.

This, obviously, causes the News page to not display any news. Why? Because of
this bit of SQL:

$query1 .= 'IF(start_time IS NULL AND end_time IS NULL,news_date <=
NOW(),NOw() BETWEEN start_time AND end_time)';

(/modules/News/action.default.php, line 105)


The issue is with how the logic is constructed - it will only look for news_date
<= NOW() - if and only if - both start_time and end_time are NULL -- otherwise,
it'll try to fit "now" between them. If only one of them is NULL, this obviously
fails.


The fix is to make a logical inversion here, so that we're making BETWEEN a
special case and not the norm - like so:

$query1 .= 'IF(start_time IS NOT NULL AND end_time IS NOT NULL, NOW() BETWEEN
start_time AND end_time, news_date <= NOW())';

Notice how I now check for both NOT being null, and only then try to fit them
"between" start and end; otherwise I only check if the date isn't in the future.


I suspect this is a hold-over from some old version where start_time was used in
place of news_date? Regardless, if you're upgrading form an older CMS MS
installation, this will rear its ugly head - and you can't just mass-NULL the
field in the DB, either.