Error on my Control Panel

[verdura]

Hi all,

Today, out of the blue, I'm getting this error when clicking the Control Panel:

An error has occurred.
0 Call to a member function format() on null
Return to Control Panel

I need please help!

Thanks in advance!

[waarnemer]

There never is "an out of the blue".

You may have fallen victim to your hosting provider performing server upgrade from old PHP5 to 7... and some plugin from the past can't handle the new PHP7

if you can, check your webserver error log.

[verdura]

Thanks waarnemer,

I consider that and already change the PHP version from 7.0 (current) to 5.6 but the error stayed the same...

[waarnemer]

You are aware PHP7.0 also has reached EOL? (https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php)

anyway... what does the error log show? There usually is a message that may hint to your problem.
also, check on top of this thread for the FPA tool... very useful...

[AMurray]

Yes, "PHP 7.0" is definitely not current. 7.4 was released last week.

[uksamo]

"Out of the blue" we have exactly the same issue occur over the last couple of days. The rest of the admin console appears to work fine but the control panel page generates the "Call to a member function format() on null" error!

I've compared the entire web root with a backup from last month and nothing Joomla related appears to have changed. I did create an override for the profile editor page of one of our templates recently, so it shows those additional files. I have removed them to confirm it wasn't that, and as expected it made no difference.

There's no error in the PHP logs, nothing related in the MySQL logs. We fully manage our server and have not run any upgrades to either the platform or Joomla over the past few weeks, no server reboots etc. The same error occurs for different admin users and across different web browsers etc. I'm at a bit of a loss of where to look next.

Any help or pointers of where to look next would be helpful. Thanks.

[verdura]

Hi uksamo,

I've managed to get past the error just by changing the PHP version. We where in 7.0 and change it to 7.2
In reality, it was a member of the hosting provider that did it but he gave us this explanation...

See if it helps. I could ask for more details if that doesn't help!

Regards

[uksamo]

Thanks for the update, we're also on 7.0 at the moment. Unfortunately it's a production server so upgrading PHP would require a lot of testing before we could go live. Very strange how it's suddenly occurred for no obvious reason.

[verdura]

Can you make a clone of your site to other server and test it with another php version?

[sozzled]

Any help or pointers of where to look next would be helpful. Thanks.