After issue at web host articles no longer show on homepage

[burtbick]

I've searched for a solution to this problem and so far have not found anything that fits the problem that I'm having. Lots of similar issues, but so far none of the suggestions I have found corrects the problem.

My Joomla 1.5 site has been working fine for a year, but last night there was some issue at the hosting company and in the article component are on the home page I was getting a mySQL error, and also getting a 500 error when trying to get to Article Manager in the admin section. Those two issues were resolved by the hosting company, but along the way the home page no longer displays articles.

If I do:
http://www.twofortheroadtn.com/
Which is how users normally would get to my site I get a small blank box where the article should be. Right now I have some test text via PHP code that appears there.

If I do the following then the article does appear as expected on the home page.
http://www.twofortheroadtn.com/index.ph ... 6&Itemid=1

Everything appears to be correct as far as published, show on home page, etc.

This happens no matter what template I select so it is not related to a specific template. Again this was working fine until the MySQL error and the 500 Server error which was related to a permission issue with /tmp according to the web hosting support.

I've checked settings for:

Front Page Manager - My article(s) are Published and Public, Publish date is way back in 2010 as it has been, and Finish Publishing is never.

Looking at the Article:
Section and Category are set as they have always been. Published and Show on Home Page are both set.

Main Menu - Default and Published. Type Articles >>Home Page, Public access,
Home is Front Page Blog Layout - ID=1 Published, Public,
Params - Basic - Leading 1, Intro 4, Columns 1, Links 4
Params - Adv - Cat Order - No, Order by Primary Order Only. Primary Order - Oldest first
Params - component all appear to be as they have been for a year.

Section - is Published, and Public
Category - is Published, and Public

As mentioned, the article will display on non-Home pages and if I use the URL including the article and Itemid=1 then it displays on the Home page.

Can anyone suggest something short of doing a reinstall that might correct the problem? The rest of the site appears to be working properly.

Thanks,
Burt

[burtbick]

Replying to myself, hopefully to help someone in the future.

My web host had a problem that changed some permissions, including access to /tmp. This led to problems with my Joomla based site as mentioned above. One of the errors mentioned a failure in components/com_content/models/frontpage.php on line 104. And another error related to MySQL. These errors were displayed where the article content should have been on the homepage.

In addition I was unable to bring up Article Manager due to the permission issue.

I had sent a support request and they pretty quickly responded that it was working normally. So when I went to check I saw no error messages, but no article text. Just the small rectangle where the article text should be.

In the meantime they finally fixed the permission issues so I could access Article Manager again. I spent a number of hours trying to track the root cause down but everything appeared to be configured correctly.

I finally went back and was going to look at frontpage.php to see what was up. Imagine my surprise to find no frontpage.php, just frontpage.php.bk

It appears that the support tech "fixed" my error problem on the home page by renaming frontpage.php !!!!!

Needless to say I sent them a rather stern comment stating that this was not a valid fix!

So if you are chasing something similar don't always assume that it is something that you have done. It is probably a good idea to carefully validate the core Joomla files on your installation, or quiz your hosting support for details about how they "fixed" a problem.

Hope this helps someone in the future.

Burt