Functions lost during malware cleanup

[JoboUSA]

Hey all,

A while back, we had some malware and redirect issues with our site.
Godaddy in their wisdom cleaned up the problems, but as a result the site has lots most of its functions:
Landing page no longer displays the side bar menu and links or, in fact anything other than the actual content on that particular page set as the "home" or landing page.

When i manually key in the address of any other page, the pages come up, but again, without the side bar navigation menu or any other header or footer links.

I am totally lost.
Sadly, this site is on 2.5, and the creator is not available to help us any longer. We would love to get this going, but have no idea where to start - can anyone help us figure this out?

I am not an IT person, but did do extensive HTML work in the late 90s (wowza that sounds awful), but will follow along any suggestions or advice.

Thanks!

[AMurray]

The only way to truly clean up a malware-infected site is delete *everything* and restore from a clean backup. I wouldn't expect only the host to be doing the backups.

Recover from Hack (process is the same to clean up malware etc): viewtopic.php?f=714&t=946026

I expect all you need to do is re-assign the side bar / navigation elements (if they are modules....) back to the pages they are supposed to be shown on. Maybe you'd need to re-install any extensions you had - that will be difficult, give Joomla 2.5 is no longer supported, and I would think most developers of 3P extensions have moved on to developing for Joomla 3.x.

Personally I would start from scratch, with a Joomla site v 3.9.16 (the current version) and move hosts.
Here's the Practical Migration Guide: viewtopic.php?f=710&t=793171. Note the system requirements and ensure your extensions are 3.x compatible (or built for 3.x).

Best advice would be to install Joomla 3.9.16 on your own PC running a localhost server like WAMPServer, and start over with building your site. Then you can migrate to the live hosting when ready using a very handy backup tool, Akeeba Backup and Kickstart (these take the effort out of exporting SQL databases, FTP'ing files and so on)..... you have just two files - the kickstart script and your backup archive.

As part of migration activity, you could copy / paste all articles into the new site, article by article, but there are also tools that might help migrate data. J2XML is often mentioned on this forum: https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/j2xml/

[Per Yngve Berg]

If your host have updated the version of php to 7.x, Joomla 2.5 will no longer run.

Max php version is 5.6 if your site is updated to 2.5.28

[Webdongle]

The only way to truly clean up a malware-infected site is delete *everything* and restore from a clean backup....

Unlikely that the backup was clean. Best delete and replace the files. Although your site is old and it would probably be quicker to rebuild completely using the latest Joomla. Oh ... and get a better host Godaddy are useless.