This past weekend, a client of ours from Kuwait emailed us and told us that the backend of his Joomla website is displaying a blank page. He told us that the login page to the backend was working, but, as soon as you login, you will see a blank page. He also told us that the problem happened after updating the obRSS extension.
Naturally, the first thing that we did was to disable the obRSS system plugin by renaming its folder under the plugins/system folder, but, unfortunately, that didn’t fix the problem, so the problem must have been caused by something else.
We then enabled error reporting on the Joomla website by setting the value of the $error_reporting variable to maximum (in the global configuration.php file), but we still saw a blank page. This meant that the “@” operator was used and/or output buffering was enabled somewhere, so we tried to disable output buffering through various means, but that didn’t work. We still saw a blank page.
After our 2 failed attempts to unveil the actual error, we decided to debug the issue the good old way. We renamed the whole modules folder (under the administrator folder) to modules_old and we tried to load the backend, and this time, it did work (albeit with no modules whatsoever). This meant that the problem was caused by one of the administrator modules. So we renamed the modules_old folder back to modules, and then we renamed the folders (modules) inside that folder one by one, and we tested the website after each rename. Once we renamed the mod_menu folder to mod_menu_old, the problem was no more! This was weird, we thought, since the problem turned out to be with a core module (we thought that this was caused by a 3rd party module/plugin).
After discovering that the problem was caused by the mod_menu folder, which is located under the administrator/modules folder, we needed to display the actual error. So, we added the following 3 lines to the very beginning of the menu.php file (which is located under the administrator/modules/mod_menu folder):
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
After doing the above, we loaded the backend of the Joomla website, and this time we saw an error instead of a blank page. It was this one::
Fatal error: Class 'Joomla\CMS\Menu\Tree' not found in /home/[cpanel-user]/public_html/administrator/modules/mod_menu/menu.php on line 63
Hmmm! The above error felt like it was caused by an incomplete Joomla 3.8.1 update, as it seems that the backend menu module was trying to use dependencies from a Joomla 3.8 instance despite the fact that the Joomla website was running 3.7.0. So, we renamed the libraries folder to libraries_old, and recopied the libraries folder from a fresh copy of Joomla 3.7.0, but that didn’t fix the problem.
So we thought, maybe the problem was only in the aforementioned menu.php file, so we copied that file from a fresh Joomla 3.7.0 install, and we loaded the backend of the site. This time, we saw a different error, it was this one:
Fatal error: Call to undefined method ModMenuHelper::getComponents() in /home/[cpanel-user]/public_html/administrator/modules/mod_menu/preset/enabled.php on line 297
So, we did the same thing for the enabled.php file (we copied it from a fresh Joomla 3.7.0) install. We then reloaded the backend, and yet another different error was displayed:
Fatal error: Call to undefined method JAdminCssMenu::getTree() in /home/[cpanel-user]/public_html/administrator/modules/mod_menu/tmpl/default.php on line 17
At this point, we were no longer having fun. So we copied the whole administrator/mod_menu folder from a fresh copy of Joomla 3.7.0 to the current site (after deleting the old mod_menu folder), and this time, it worked! There were no errors being displayed.
Despite fixing the problem, we didn’t feel satisfied, because we felt that the website was in an unstable state. From our experience, a failed Joomla update doesn’t only affect one folder. So, we asked for permission from the client to update the website, and we were granted that permission immediately.
We initiated the Joomla update by clicking on the Update Now button on the home screen of the backend of the Joomla website (of course, we backed up both the filesystem and the database of the website before proceeding), and, instead of having a smooth update, we saw the following error:
Error: Could not open /home/[cpanel-user]/public_html/cache/index.html for writing.
So, we loaded the backend again, and this time, we saw a blank page. We immediately suspected that the blank page was caused by the administrator menu module, and disabling that module by renaming the mod_menu folder (under the administrator folder) to mod_menu_old confirmed our suspicions. Not only that, this failed update allowed us to understand the original cause of the problem: the client tried to update the Joomla website, and it failed on him, but, it did that after updating the administrator menu module to its Joomla 3.8.1 code, which made the module incompatible with the current website, thus triggering the error.
So, we reverted the administrator menu module to Joomla 3.7.0 (again), and we checked the permissions on the index.html file (which is located under the cache folder). They were the following:
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Apr 26 2017 index.html*
Obviously, the permissions and the ownership of the file were both wrong, so we fixed them by issuing the following 2 commands in the shell:
chmod 644 index.html
chown [cpanel-user].[cpanel-user] index.html
We then reattempted the update and this time it worked! The website was updated to Joomla 3.8.1 and was working without a hitch. Hooray!
We hope that you found this post useful and that it helped you resolve your problem. If it didn’t, or if you need help with the implementation, then please contact us! Our fees are affordable, our work is professional, and we will be your true Joomla friends!