Joomla “unintentionally” (I guess) decided to break the Joomla admin panel if you’re running an outdated version reached end of support date. Sorry to disappoint you, but sometimes migration takes time!
If you are running an old version of Joomla with on PHP 7.2 or less, you should’ve started seeing this since November 30, 2020. If you try try to login to the Admin Panel, after you enter your credentials, you’ll get a blank page with no indication of what’s going on. Your first thought would be, have I been pawned! Your next action will be to check your homepage which will be fine.
It turns out that Joomla has set a version check whenever before it loads the Admin Panel components to show you a warning message. That’s all good but the crooks of the matter is if the End of Support (eos) date is reached, it’ll fail to load other components, rendering your Admin panel not loaded. The intention is good to warn you on sunsetting PHP 7.2, but not that great!
Anyway, to fix the issue, change the eos date (line 134) to 2021 🙃🤭
The path of the file should be: public_html/plugins/quickicon/phpversioncheck/phpversioncheck.php
That should fix the issue and you should consider seriously migrating to a newer version or a different platform asap.
If you’re wondering how to find this type of issues, here is what you need to do:
- If you have shared hosting, create a file and name it php.ini, the add these 2 lines:
- display_errors = On
- error_reporting = E_All & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_STRICT
- edit the index.php in the main folder for the site (in my case it was under public_html/index.php) and add this line in line 2 after the opening of <?php
- ini_set(‘display_errors’, TRUE); error_reporting(E_ALL);
- Edit configuration.php in the home directory to set error reporting to development mode
- Change $error_reporting from ‘none’ to ‘development’
- Now last step is, try to login and repeat the actions to trigger the logging
- Then, go check the log file under public_html/Administrator/error_log
- Review carefully based on timestamp and you should find what causes the issue 🙂
Don’t forget to reverse the actions you performed above (comment out what you added, change development to none, comment out the parts you added to the php.ini).
Good luck!