All right, first: don’t panic! Second: don’t panic! And third: did I mention not to panic? Joomla is specific CMS, it’s not always behaves like a adult person who always more or less exactly say where or what it hurts. It sometimes behaves like a small child or offended girl, no matter what version you’re using.
When you receive a blank white screen there are a couple of things that may be going on. This often, but not always, happens after updating a module, plugin, component, or uninstalling them. If error reporting is turned off, you could be getting a fatal error but not seeing it. On a production site, it’s common to have error reporting turned off. I always do that.
First step
So, first turn on showing PHP errors in your configuration.php file if you don’t have access also to Joomla administrator panel. You can turn on the error display setting through the .htaccess file. To turn on the error display, you’ll need to create a .htaccess file with the following line: php_flag display_errors on.
After changes, load the same page that caused the same error in the first place. Then you will see what kind of error that makes your Joomla 2.5 sites blank screen.
Second step
Second try to remember what extenstion you’ve tried to uninstall, check the installation file extensions for Joomla from which consist of elements, then connect to the server via FTP and manually delete folders such as plug-in or module included in the extension. Plugin you will find in folder named plugins, but but the name of a subfolder depends on the type of plugin. I recommend Filezilla FTP Client, located at filezilla-project.org.
I’ve turned the error display on, but still I’ve a blank page.
It indicates that there is no error in the coding area. The blank page might be caused by the Joomla admin settings, check all installed an additional extensions.
A Blank page after installing a plugin
If you get a blank page after installing a plugin, the first thing to check is the newly installed plugin.
- If you can still access the Joomla admin panel, you can deactivate the newly installed plugin to see if it brings your homepage back to normal. If you are not sure which plugin is causing the issue, you can deactivate all of them and then activate one by one – it can help narrow down a culprit module.
- If you can’t access your admin panel, you can deactivate the plugins through your database management panel like PhpMyAdmin or use Adminer (formerly phpMinAdmin).
Summary
As they say, prevention is better than cure. So next time you try to use a well-written and tested extensions like ours from Gavick.