OpenID plugin showing blank admin screen with no errors in log file

On a clean new install of Elgg 1.7.6 on Ubuntu I tried adding the OpenID module from here:
http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/release/437384/developer/kevin/openid-client

and unzipped it into the mod directory as the README.txt recommends ("Just unzip into your Elgg mod directory and activate").    Upon activating the module it happily says:

Plugin openid_client was enabled successfully.

and shows a link called "Configure OpenID client" in the admin tools on the left.

 

However, when I click this link I'm sent to

http://[my_domain]/elgg/pg/openid_client/admin

which is a completely blank page with a 500 Internal Server Error status.

However I'm seeing absolutely nothing in my /var/log/apache2/error.log .  However I do see the request with the 500 status in the /var/log/apache2/access.log, so I'm pretty sure I'm looking in the right place for the errors.

I also get a similar failure when attempting to log in with openid.

Any guess what I'm missing?   It's like php is crashing without even having a chance to log why.

 

How might i debug what's going wrong here?

 

  • Re-installed again; this time installing the plugin before creating the database and being more careful about my data director....      Now when I try to log in using openid and verisign PIP I get:

    Unable to save new object's base entity information!