Last Updated on December 1, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
I was working with a client’s site. I had just done an upgrade to Joomla 2.5. I was having some problems with a menu item that kept returning to it’s original position despite being moved several times.
I emptied the menu trash (Which is a bit hard to figure out the first time in Joomla 2.5). I also ran Akeeba’s Admin Tools and ran through most of the settings there. During the process, I had set a template up to only apply to one page. NOTE TO SELF– try not to make too many changes at one time because if the stinky stuff hits the spinning blades, you won’t be able to figure out what caused the problem as easily.
When I went back to the front end, clicking on the logon menu item resulted in a blank white screen. I tried adding a login module with the same result.
I then went into PHPMyadmin and tried repairing the data tables. That had no result. In fact, the site began to respond very slowly (Which might have been unrelated).
My son checked the site with his iPad and got the same result. I took a ‘break’ and checked the site on my phone. The surprise was that the site, menus and login were working perfectly. I have Jtouch enabled on that site which renders a mobile version of the site.
It dawned on me that the site was still working, that the database was intact and that the problem was being caused by the menu or template.
I made the new template the default ….. and……. the site came back instantly. Everything worked including the login. Apparently something had broken in the relationship between the database, joomla, the template and the menu.
V2.5 added JHtml::_('behavior.noframes') to the default login screen. This behavior is supposed to issue the blank appearing screen when a page is hijacked in an iframe but in some templates the blank screen appears on a normal login. I haven't figured out why that happens but that is what's happening.