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Site Restoration

#35384 Joomla administrator page displays a white screen

Posted in ‘Site restoration’
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CMS Type
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Latest post by on Thursday, 15 July 2021 20:17 CDT

lesc1

Hello,

I would like to test new features that I'll be adding to the Joomla site at saint-marys.ca. I created a backup and restored the site at stmarys.mwvdev.info. The front end looks fine but the backend at stmarys.mwvdev.info/administrator displays a white screen.

I've looked at the .htaccess and configuration.php files but haven't found anything that might be causing a problem.

Thank you,

Les Coleman

tampe125
Akeeba Staff

Hello,

when do you get the white page? After you login or when you immediately visit the backend login form?

I just connected to the above address and the site was loading properly, maybe there's a cache issue? 
If the problem was occurring after the login, it means that there is a PHP error happening somewhere.

First, check your server's error logs (not the access logs) immediately after visiting the page which throws the error. There should be an exact description of the PHP fatal error which occurred. Sometimes you can find the error messages in files called error_log or error.log inside the site's root and/or administrator directories. If unsure about the error log location, please consult your host. Most likely the error logs are available in your site's hosting control panel.

If your host does not give you access to the error logs and you have access to the Joomla! administrator area, please log in to your site's back-end, go to Global Configuration, click on the Server tab and set the Error Reporting to Development. Try visiting the problem page again.

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.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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