Administrator Back End No CSS

[snowgoose]

I was logged in to my admin back end of my J4 site when the CSS disappeared! That is, the administrator panel is text-only and impossible to use (see screenshot)

Logging out and in again makes no difference.
Clearing browser cache no difference.
Changing from Firefox to Chrome no difference.

My site is now unusable. A last resort is to restore a backup because I've done a lot of work since my last backup.

Can anyone please help?

Dave

[webmasterab]

If you are logged in, is the site loaded correctly and provided with the CSS?

[Per Yngve Berg]

It's caused by a double Gzip Configuration.

[snowgoose]

If I log in, the site is still bad with no css.
I don't understand what you mean by double gzip config. Could you explain how I fix this please? I haven't edited or changed any files, it just refreshed into no css. Thanks.

[snowgoose]

It's caused by a double Gzip Configuration.

Please could you explain? I don't understand how I can fix this. The front end of my site is working ok but the backend has no CSS and I cannot make any changes to my front end.
Thank you

[Per Yngve Berg]

Gzip Page Compression is in Global Configuration->Server

[snowgoose]

Gzip Page Compression is in Global Configuration->Server

I have found the setting but it is set to "NO". I have tried setting it to "YES" but it makes no difference.
I have also tried removing all GZIP lines in .htaccess but whatever I do makes no difference at all. The whole of my admin back end is plain text and unusable. Is this a bug in J4?

[sozzled]

Gzip Page Compression is in Global Configuration->Server

I have found the setting but it is set to "NO". I have tried setting it to "YES" but it makes no difference.
I have also tried removing all GZIP lines in .htaccess but whatever I do makes no difference at all. The whole of my admin back end is plain text and unusable. Is this a bug in J4?

Which lines—can you tell us the line numbers please—did you remove? I also suggest you search Google for other articles/suggestions about this issue. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=the+ ... ip+problem

[ceford]

See this link:

https://docs.joomla.org/J4.x:Assorted_I ... no_styling

It is probably the css and js files that are being gzipped by your server and your .htaccess file.

[snowgoose]

Gzip Page Compression is in Global Configuration->Server

I have found the setting but it is set to "NO". I have tried setting it to "YES" but it makes no difference.
I have also tried removing all GZIP lines in .htaccess but whatever I do makes no difference at all. The whole of my admin back end is plain text and unusable. Is this a bug in J4?

Which lines—can you tell us the line numbers please—did you remove? I also suggest you search Google for other articles/suggestions about this issue. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=the+ ... ip+problem

I removed all lines with GZIP in them. 395 - 429, 432-437. I tried combinations of these 2 blocks either commented out or not. I also tried all combinations with the switch in the server section of global config either on or off.

[snowgoose]

See this link:

https://docs.joomla.org/J4.x:Assorted_I ... no_styling

It is probably the css and js files that are being gzipped by your server and your .htaccess file.

I have tried removing .htaccess altogether but this doesn't help.

[sozzled]

Question: do you have another file named .htaccess somewhere in your website filesystem tree (e.g. <your-domain>/<sub-folder>/.htaccess or <your-domain>/administrator/.htaccess)?

I removed all lines with GZIP in them. 395 - 429, 432-437.

I do not have any J! websites with that many lines of code in the file <root>/.htaccess. I think the biggest .htaccess file I've got is less than 150 lines. So, I don't know where these other few hundred lines of of .htaccess code have appeared from. Do you know?

Perhaps you have nested your website's filesystem under another website's filesystem? I'm just guessing here. We don't know much about how (or where) you're placed the files used to service your website(s). If you can't give us a more detailed picture of (a) how many websites you have, and (b) how you've constructed them, then—I'm sorry to say and to parrot back to you—this doesn't help, does it?

[snowgoose]

Question: do you have another file named .htaccess somewhere in your website filesystem tree (e.g. <your-domain>/<sub-folder>/.htaccess or <your-domain>/administrator/.htaccess)?

I removed all lines with GZIP in them. 395 - 429, 432-437.

I do not have any J! websites with that many lines of code in the file <root>/.htaccess. I think the biggest .htaccess file I've got is less than 150 lines. So, I don't know where these other few hundred lines of of .htaccess code have appeared from. Do you know?

Perhaps you have nested your website's filesystem under another website's filesystem? I'm just guessing here. We don't know much about how (or where) you're placed the files used to service your website(s). If you can't give us a more detailed picture of (a) how many websites you have, and (b) how you've constructed them, then—I'm sorry to say and to parrot back to you—this doesn't help, does it?

I do have other .htaccess files but they are all in subfolders within the Akeeba backup & tools folders, so I assume they are ok. I too have never seem one that long, but it's a clean install of J4 (latest version). My website's files are stored in folders under the publichtml folder. There is no nesting. There are so many headaches with J4 that I am going to go back to 3.10 as my sites running on 3.10 have no issues at all. J4's backend is just awful to navigate, Ignite Gallery plug-ins don't work even though they specify J4 compatibility, other supposedly J4 friendly components throw up errors...I have so far converted 5 J3 sites to J4 and spent many 100s of hours doing it. I just wish I hadn't bothered.

[sozzled]

This should be something fairly straightforward—not that I'm passing any commentary about the difficulties that people encounter with J! 4.x—but, because of the way that this forum is operated, because of recent changes to the Forum Rules (a) you cannot contact me privately to seek help offline from the forum and (b) I am not allowed to contact you privately to offer you a pathway to give you my help. Therefore, because of the Forum Rules, we are restricted to communicating in public: i.e. you write something, I write something and, perhaps a day later, you write something else and we continue this way.

If I were in your situation I would rename any file currently named .htaccess located within the filesystem path to something like htaccess.old to, at least, exclude the possibility that such files may be responsible for the problem(s) you're having.

As you say, you're making certain assumptions; I'm just making educated guesses. I'm guessing that you have one website located under the /public_html folder and that's the only website you're running. I could be right or I could be wrong.

If, as you write, your one website has a file named /public_html/.htaccess, and the website's filesystem is a clean installation of J! 4.1.3, and the .htaccess file contained more than 150 lines in it, these two facts do not seem congruent. So, again I'm making a guess, the so-called "clean installation" of J! 4.1.3 is in fact based on a J! 3.10 website—goodness knows where that website is located—that was migrated to J! 4.1.3 but the original J! 3.10 website was not fit-for-purpose for upgrading.

We could go back and forth like this for as long as you like—days, weeks or months—or you could (a) abandon your attempts to use J! 4.x (as you've indicated), (b) persevere as well as you can within the confines of this forum or (c) seek help outside this forum. The choice is really yours. The solution may arrive through effort or serendipity but, however it arrives, I wish you the best of good fortune.

[snowgoose]

[ redacted ]

Thanks for your reply. To answer your questions, this site is one of several sites, each of which is under the main /home/ directory. Public_html is the dir for the main site (not the one in question) . All other sites have their domain name as the dir name, each at the same tree-level as public_html. So in this case the .htaccess is in a dir called "v4.ragwaste.com" which was created when I created a sub-domain.
One of the first things I tried was removing .htaccess but this made no difference. I have never had any success upgrading j3 to j4 so the way I do it now is to install a clean j4 (currently 4.1.4) into a new, empty directory. I then open each article in the j3 site and copy the html into a new article on the j4 site. Then I create the menus, and install new j4 compatible extensions where required. I always install akeeba admin tools and backup.

I've just realised that the large .htaccess was created by admin tools, so the clean j4 install probably had a "normal" .htaccess. But in any case , removing .htaccess did not solve the problem.
I'm sure the problem could be resolved by deleting everything and reinstalling j4, but as I can create a working j3.10 site in less than half the time it takes to create a j4 site, I think my best option is just to go back to j3.10 for all my sites and have a stress-free life!