A white page or a page with a 500 Internal Server Error is, in fact, a PHP fatal error in disguise.
First try to edit your Global Configuration and set Site Debug to Yes and Error Reporting to Development. Retry accessing the page that causes the error. You should now get a more verbose output. Please copy all of that information here so we can help you.
If you still get a blank page, edit your configuration.php file and put the following code right after the final closing curly brace ( this is what a curly brace looks like -->
} ) but
before the closing PHP tag (it looks like ?> that is a question mark and a greater-than sign):
ini_set( 'display_errors', true );
error_reporting( E_ALL );
Try visiting the problem page again.
If you still get a white page, please remove the two lines from your configuration.php file. Edit the .htaccess file in your site's root. If you don't have a file named .htaccess create a new one. Beware that htaccess.txt is a
DIFFERENT FILE and will NOT work! Add the following to the end of the file:
php_flag display_errors On
php_value error_reporting 32767
and retry loading the problem page.
If you still get a white page, remove the two lines from your .htaccess file. Now, create a file called php.ini with the following content:
display_errors=on
error_reporting=E_ALL
and upload it into your site's root and your site's administrator directory. Retry loading the problem page.
If that fails again, remove the php.ini file and create a file named .user.ini (note that it's dot user dot ini, the leading dot is important) with the contents:
display_errors=on
error_reporting=E_ALL
and upload it into your site's root and your site's administrator directory. Wait for 10 minutes. Waiting is important, .user.ini files do not apply immediately. Retry loading the problem page.
IMPORTANT: Sometimes the error won't show. Edit your configuration.php and find the line starting with public $error_reporting and set it to:
public $error_reporting = 'development';
This instructs Joomla! to enable maximum error, warnings and notices verbosity. In 99.9% of cases it will result in the error messages being shown on the browser.
If you still get a white page, delete the php.ini or .user.ini file your created and consult your host. They have to provide you the PHP error message, file and line it occurs (along with the error's backtrace) themselves.
Please note that if you can not understand what the PHP error message means, just copy and paste it here verbatim so that we can take a look and point you to the right direction.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!
