Search function not working in research site built with Joomla! 1.5.26

[john drew]

Apologies if this is a misfire. I 'run' a research site built by a superb long departed technician in Joomla! 1.5.26

It is text and image based--30,000 images (a Victorian magazine) with associated transcript (30,000,000 words of text).

For a few months now, the Search function leads to an error message:

500 - TocModel::getRows DBO Error : Could not connect to MySQL

Does anyone know of a simple fix for this through the Administrator back end, for a non-computer-programmer?

[Per Yngve Berg]

Mod. Note: Relocated the topic to the J1.5 Forum. Support for J1.5 ended in 2012.

This version may seas to stop working if the version of php on the server is updated to 7.x. Last working version is 5.6.

Is the Administrator back-end working? The error message indicates a problem with connecting to the database. It cannot be the database Joomla is using, as it would have stopped working completely.

Perhaps you have an extension that connects to another database that have been taken down.

[john drew]

Thanks Per, I'll investigate this. Maybe also transfer my query to the J1.5 forum, as the moderator suggests!

the back end is working and the main site is all working fine--just the search extension that isn't which suggests it was maybe on another database...

[Per Yngve Berg]

Go to Plugin Manager and see if any extra Search Plugins are installed.