TOPIC: Blank Page

As discussed on Twitter, the Dashboard shows a blank page in J! 3.3.3 with zero errors from Joomla, the console or general PHP errors. From what I can tell though the lists, users and module all seem to work just fine while subscribing new users. Looks like it might just be something that loads when the Dashboard page loads.

Go in the backend, system->global configuration. SEt error reporting to maximum. Now when you go to the dashboard it shouldn't show you a blank page, but the error that prevents the page from loading.

Regards,
Daniel

It shows exactly as I said, nothing. It's an entirely blank page. Even with error reporting on.

Right click on the page -> view source. Is it empty? If you don't see anything it means that something is preventing the errors from showing on. If you can't show them by changing the values in the global config, then ask your server administrator to configure php to display those. You should be able to manipulate this setting through joomla.

Regards,
Daniel

I am the server administrator. PHP Error Display is on and Joomla is set to Max. However the page is entirely blank including being completely empty of all HTML. Nadda.

I have noticed though that it tried longer to load the dashboard than any other page on the backend then it's like it times out.

Is allow_url_fopen enabled on your site, or do you have the curl library?

Both are enabled.

Any thoughts?

No, i think we have to look at it ourself - can you create a super admin account for us? (Send the credentials to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), then we have a look.

Kind regards,

Yves

Email sent.

Something is blocking the error output (ini_set function or something) can you provide FTP access also?

Kind regards,

Yves

So, I had a look at your site and you need to figure out why error reporting is not working. It is not just in cmc, but everywhere. Also you have wrong valued for the error_log -> it should be the path to the log and not just error_log.

Other than that the error seems to occur in libraries/joomla/feed/factory.php line 71 .
This is where I was able to track it. After that line no die() statement was executed. But what exactly happens there is beyond me, since I cannot see the error messages.

We've commented out the line that tries to read the rss from our site and the dashboard is now loading, but I would strongly advise to get down at the bottom of this as this will cause you more headaches in the long term.

Regards,
Daniel

Well, actually something is going on on your server. I tried to save the view file of the dashboard.php and now it saves as an empty file. Do you have enough disc space on the server? Because it seems that it is writing to the file, but when I download the file from the server it is empty.

Regards,
Daniel

I checked the server and the files from the component download directly from your site and I don't find dashboard.php at all. Am I missing something? Yes, the server has free space and this account is not above quota. Space is fine.

administrator/components/views/dashboard/tmpl/default.php

I wanted to write dashboard view and not dashboard.php sorry.

I manually went into the terminal as root and pasted the code into the file. It's there and now we have something but... well, you'll just have to see if you can login to the admin and view it again.

It looks like when you edited the factory.php file it went blank too. I commented out the same lines but the log definitely shows that it's something to do with reading the feed from your component. I wonder... can we look at that?

yep, that comes from the xmlreader which is a php library bundled with php. Disable the call to the feed in dashboard default.php that I mentioned above and the dashboard will load.

There is definetly something wrong with your php/apache installation, but I have no idea what. The script should not terminate white it is reading the feed & it doesn't terminate on 1000 of other pages.
What I would suggest is -> backup of the site, try it on localhost or on a different server. If it is working, then the problem is in the specific configuration of the server.
I have the component running on few different servers and I haven't come accross this. My guess is that there is something corrupt somewhere. Maybe re-compiling php would help.

Regards,
Daniel

I am running our (many) sites on a server with the large US company, Namecheap.

As I am having the same issue off a simple clean install with a client site of ours, and knew that someone else would be experiencing it as well, I promptly found this forum entry. This is Namecheap's reseller support reply when I queried them on this issue.

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We have investigated the issue and see the following errors in our error log file:
[Wed Sep 24 15:12:18 2014] [error] [client 205.251.129.126] Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 176160768 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 165939201 bytes) in /home/newhopec/public_html/libraries/joomla/feed/factory.php on line 71, referer: newhopeforlife.org.au/administrator/index.php

It means that when it tries to open CMC page in your admin area, that process tries to allocate more memory that it is allowed in your PHP settings. It is possible to increase memory_limit, however, there is no sense doing it in this separate case, because high memory usage of that process is caused by huge amount of failures of your script. There is huge amount of common records in error log file located at public_html/administrator:

[24-Sep-2014 15:09:31 America/New_York] PHP Warning: XMLReader::read() [<a href='xmlreader.read'>xmlreader.read</a>]: An Error Occured while reading in /home/newhopec/public_html/libraries/joomla/feed/factory.php on line 71

Those errors are generated when you try to open CMC in admin area. This issue seems to be related to code_debugging, because we do not see any hosting issues at the moment. Unfortunately, we do not provide code debugging support. Such cases are not related to our hosting services. Code debugging includes testing for errors or determining the cause of an error and fixing it. The reason we do not provide such options is that such cases refers to site development service and not to hosting related one. We recommend you to contact webmaster or the developer of the code to resolve the issue.

Feel free to contact us again in case of any questions or issues.

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So, we know where the issue is, and I would like to know if this code is necessary for it to run, and if there is a simple way to disable this code so that I can implement CMC.
thank you
Garth Penglase

ps. if two of us are having problems with this out of the box and are willing to report it, you can bet your life that there are others, probably many, that are experiencing the same, but can't be bothered so just uninstall it and move on, which is what I was going to do but found that AllChimpRegister hasn't yet upgraded for J3.x yet.