“500 – Unable to load renderer class” Error on Joomla

A Joomla designer called us this morning and told us that he was seeing the following error when trying to load the Joomla website of his client:

500 – Unable to load renderer class

He told us that this whole thing happened after switching to a new template, and that reverting back to the old template did fix the problem for him (but he really needed the new template to work). This little piece of information was super useful for us, as it narrowed down our search area from all of the Joomla website, to a specific template.

So, we opened the main index.php of the problematic template, and it didn’t take us long to figure out where the problem lied. It was this line:

<jdoc:include type="logo" name="modules" style="none" />

The thing is, logo is not a jdoc type – it is a jdoc name. So, we changed the above line to this one…

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="logo" style="none" />

… and that fixed the problem!

But what are the allowed jdoc types?

In case you’re wondering, the allowed jdoc types are the following:

  • component
  • head
  • message
  • module
  • modules

If one of your jdoc types is not not in the above list, then you are likely to see the “500 – Unable to load renderer class” error on your Joomla website.

We hope that you found this very shot post helpful (we’re not fond of short posts at itoctopus) and we hope that it solved your problem. If it didn’t, then please contact us. We are always glad to help, our work is super professional, and we don’t charge much.

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