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Site Restoration

#14157 I cant view the front end of my site after restore to a test server

Posted in ‘Site restoration’
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Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Environment Information

PHP version
n/a
CMS Type
Other
CMS Version
n/a
Backup Tool Version
n/a
Kickstart version
n/a

Latest post by user70487 on Friday, 04 January 2013 06:31 CST

user70487

Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Have I searched the tickets before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Joomla! version: (unknown)1.7.3
PHP version: (unknown)5.3.18
MySQL version: (unknown)5.1.65
Host: (optional, but it helps us help you)Rochen 
Akeeba Backup version which took the backup: (unknown)3.3.13
Kickstart version used to extract the backup: (unknown)3.5.2 or 3.6.0 

Description of my issue:

I am trying to duplicate a live site onto my Rochen reseller account to allow me to work on it independent to the live site. I have managed to use kickstart to extract/recover the site and it all went fine. I can access to backend of the site finr but cannot access the front-end at all. 

I have seen your comments about it not working when restoring to a temporary cPanel URL, which is what I have done. I presume this is the issue here? Is there anything I can do to get it working?

When I have finished editing the site on my rochen server I intend to recover it back to its original non - rouchen server.

Regards

Ed

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

The first thing you should do is turn off SEF URLs in your Global Configuration. If the front page loads, the temporary URL was the issue. Please note that turning off SEF URLs may make navigating to other pages of your site impossible. That's expected.

If, however, you get a white page or a page with a 500 Internal Server Error, that's a different story. A white page or a page with a 500 Internal Server Error is, in fact, either a .htaccess issue to a PHP fatal error in disguise.

First, let's see if it is a .htaccess issue. Try renaming the .htaccess file in your site's root to htaccess.bak If there is a .htaccess file in the site's administrator directory, try renaming it as well. If that solves the problem, the issue was with a directive in your .htaccess file. We'd like to recommend you to try removing directives from your .htaccess until you find the one which causes the problem.

If that doesn't help, the error you are receiving is in fact a PHP error in disguise. 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 cPanel, Plesk control panel or similar hosting account management facility.

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 Maximum (Joomla! 1.5) or Development (Joomla! 2.x and later). 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 remote 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.

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!

user70487

I discovered that the problem was caused by sh404SEO. I wasn't familiar with that extension. Since I disabled it averything works fine. 

Thanks for the help.

 

Ed.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

I'd suggest asking Anything Digital (its developers) for support, as long as you still have an active subscription with them. Most likely it's a matter of a simple settings change.

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!

user70487

Thanks. I just disabled the sh404seo extension whilst working on the site in a test area then reenabled it when I uploaded the site to its proper location (URL). Thanks for the help

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