Issues with Joomla Update, Joomla 2.5.28

[Ryuonato]

So I am having trouble with the Joomla Update Component, and the Extension Manager Update sections of my Joomla 2.5.28 website.

For some reason when I go to use either, all I get is a blank page. If I inspect the page using Firefox and go to the Console section, I get a JS error stating "The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol."

Has anyone seen this error before. I start right after I updated from 2.5.27 to 2.5.28. I'm looking into updating my site to 3.x but all the guides that we have here in the forums and else where only talk about how to use the Joomla Update section.

Any help would be awesome. Thanks.

[nhuebner]

One thing to try is to set the error logging in the Global Comfiguration to maximum, that way when you launch the updater and get that blank page, you can see any error details on the page of whatever extension is causing the blank page. It may not be the updater, just something else being loaded on the page. Once you track down the offending extension, reinstall it. If it points to a part of the core, download the update package to 2.5.28 and extract that into your home directory.

[Ryuonato]

@nhuebner: I attempted to set that setting to maximum in all the ways I could find online. However, that never seemed to work, since I am on a shared hosting account companys server. The screens never populate with anything. The only reason I even found the error with the index.php for the character encoding issue was through using the console of Firefox web browser. Had a gotten a actual error, I could have provided screen shots, but like I said it is like the pages are just not being populated through php errors that are not showing to me. Any ideas?

[conlippert]

Do you have a backup of your 2.5.27 update? I would restore and try just the update to 2.5.28 again. Possibly the update to 2.5.28 did not complete normally. Also, if you're downloading any updates, double-check the size for a complete download.

[Ryuonato]

No, unfortunately I don't have a backup of the 2.5.27 version of the site. I just checked my backups and only have ones from 2.5.28. Also, the issue stemmed in 2.5.27 if I remember correctly for my site, because I ended up having to use the zip updated files to manually apply a patch from the Extension Manager. Could I use this method to update to 3.0? or is that not advisable or should I ask that in the migrating to 3.0 forum section?

[conlippert]

No, I would not use the zip files to go to Joomla 3. Have you seen this documentation? https://docs.joomla.org/J2.5:Updating_f ... ng_version ... You could try manually updating - Method C for the 2.5.28 version. If it all goes well, then upgrade your components with the Extension manager. Also, run the database fix.

[Ryuonato]

@conlippert, So you are saying to use Method C to do a flush update of 2.5.28? Even though I have 2.5.28 already up an running with broken update components? Just wanting to make sure I have the suggestion correct. Thanks for the help Conlippert.

I will be attempting this idea. And get back to this post with my results. Thanks for the suggestion!

[conlippert]

yes, that is my suggestion thinking that some previous update did not install correctly. What 3rd party components do you have running also? It's conceivable that there might be a problem with one of them. I would turn off all my 3rd party components and if the update goes well, turn them back on one-at-a-time.

[Ryuonato]

Well I figured out the problem. After messing up my database I actually started getting errors from the libraries->joomla->http->transport folder... there was a file in there with a bunch of garbage in it, called toolbar.massmail.php, after I removed it, I got access to my joomla update systems.... So is there any way to protect against this type of website attack?