It’s often difficult to tell without any error messages.Often times, the php error logs identify what the issue is - are there any other error messages that you can provide that might provide some indication of what is occurring? Another thing that might be worth trying is clearing the caches under the site admin settings.
There are some debug settings that you can enable in the config.inc.php settings, however, I’m not sure that they would be helpful in this case. Often times, the PHP error log points to the issue that is occurring. @jnugent - would you have any other suggestions for this?
Yes, generally if you’re just getting a spinning wheel on screens, then there are probably Server 500 errors being logged in your server error logs. The time when this might not be the case is if requests are not making it to OJS from the browser, but that would be indicated in the Network tab of a web developer toolset, like the ones found in Firefox or Chrome.
I also do not believe the default manuscript theme is broken. It is widely used and if there were errors they would have been reported by now. What sort of problem are you having?