No acces to front page but acces to backend is working

Question

My Joomla 3.3.1 website was working fine until today. I haven't install nor updated anything since two-three weeks. Yesterday it was working great, but today I get this error message:

This webpage is not available

I can still access my backend and it seems that all the pages are working except the one to create new article (no matter if I try directly from the menu or from the article manager page). But I can access any existing articles.

The weird thing is that I everything is working fine if I activate the Joomla Debug system : in that case, my front-end is working and I can create a new article.

I couldn't find any clue in the Joomla debug system.

Any idea what may be the origin and what I am supposed to do to fix ? Thanks a lot for your help!

What I have tried so far but it didn't solve the problem:

1. disable Search Engine Friendly URLs and Use URL rewriting.
2. remove redirection in .htaccess

Answer 1

It works for me when I access the site, but it shows a lot of "Strict Standard" warnings. Mainly coming from a "DisplayNews" Module and from a layout override in "/templates/protostar/html/layouts/joomla/content/tags.php". You may want to try disabling at least the module to see if it causes other issues as well as it doesn't look like it's written very well.

You should also disable debug informations for public as it will show all sort of sensible information to the visitors.

If the site is back in a state where it doesn't work, you should check the server error logfile and see if there are any errors logged there.

And of course check if the site isn't hacked. If you really didn't change anything and your host didn't change anything as well, then that may be the root of your issue. There is a checklist in the doc pages which may help you: http://docs.joomla.org/Security_Checklist/You_have_been_hacked_or_defaced

Answer 2

Looks like it is working for me. It directs me to yoururl.org/en/

It therefore looks very much like you have a problem with the language settings, or indeed a extension which is having an issue with languages. Clearing your cookies may result in you being directed to the right language version, but the source of the problem will need to be determined by disabling each extension and seeing if it has any effect.

Answer 3

No sure what happened but updating to Joomla 3.3.3 solve it: I could reproduce under J3.3.3, the same error I had under J3.3.1 by modifying the module chrome file (\templates\mytemplate\html\module.php).

I haven't edited this file since a least a full month before the issue happened so I can't find out what was wrong.

Anyway, it's back now!

Update: Actually updating to 3.3.2 didn't solve it, but it helped me to find a way to go around the bug. For still unknown reason, if I have a modules.php in mytemplate/html, then some pages on my website are unavailable. I went around by adding my chrome directly in templates\system\html\modules.php. Not the best method but at least my website is back and with a nice module chrome!