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Hello,

I had a working installation of Joomla. I hosed the ja_purity template, somehow, and couldn't figure out what I did wrong or how to get it fixed. I replaced the entire set of ja_purity files, but no joy. Other templates still worked, but I didn't like the idea of having a half-assed installation. Therefore, I blew away the whole joomla installation (rm -Rf) and unpacked the installation files again. I went through the whole painful process of resetting permissions throughout the entire directory tree. I deleted the old mysql db from the original installation and I restarted both apache and mysql.

The web-based installer for the "new" installation is broken, and just returns the error indicated in the subject line.

I have created a user "joomla," who is in a group "joomla," and chowned all the files. The "joomla" user is in the "joomla" group and is also in the "admin" group, since this is Ubuntu server. I believe all the directories in the tree are 755 and all files are 644, and owned by "joomla:joomla." I also put the web server user (www-data) into the joomla group. I don't know if any of that helps or matters, but I like things tidy and there seems to be next to no information available about permissions and ownership for joomla files, beyond one sentence detailing the permissions for files and directories.

If somebody can tell me what that error message actually means, I might be able to get things working. This sure seems like a lot of punishment for accidentally mis-editing a template file.

Thanks.

mp

_________________
"If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." -- Louis Armstrong

Firstly this highlights the importance of taking regular backups particularly before making any major changes including adding extensions or hacking code.
Second it would have been possible to work around the problem by editing the database to deselect the JA Purity template as default and choose one of the other templates in the default installation.
Third, the error message you are getting would appear to be indicating a missing/corrupted part of the Joomla! package.
Finally there is quite a bit about permissions in the Joomla! Docs wiki but not so much about ownership, but these are actually not Joomla! issues but they are - in your case - Ubuntu, and Apache, MySQL, and PHP issues so perhaps researching these areas may be of benefit rather assuming Joomla! docs will cover everything.

Hello,

Thanks for the reply. As I stated in my original post, other templates worked fine. That was not the issue. I could change the default template at will. I did not want to go into production with something broken, not knowing how it was broken and therefore unable to take any kind of measures if something similar happened after going into production. As far as I could tell, all I had done was change the Logo Text field and hit 'save.' Once saved, the damage appeared to be irreparable.

I can certainly rm -Rf the entire installation a second time and unpack it again. I don't understand what, exactly, could have become "missing/corrupt" as a result of tar xzf <Joomla package>.

As far as documentation goes, I am in real life a consultant specializing in a software package every bit as unwieldy and complicated as Joomla. In my head, and in my available documentation, I have a wealth of information about the impact that various other softwares have on our application. I have spent untold hours fixing "issues" that were caused by misconfiguration of these other applications and not by our tool itself. Therefore, I do not regard it as in the least unreasonable to expect that Joomla would have similar information in its documentation. YMMV.

Thanks.

mp

_________________
"If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." -- Louis Armstrong