[Help] OJS malfunctioning after removeing the theme folder

[Dani]

Dears,

I set the OJS theme to a new theme (themeX) in the ojs/manager/setup/5 and also in the ojs/admin/settings.
It was working fine.

Then I was trying to update the theme, for that, I deleted the themeX folder from the ojs/plugins/themes folder, and instead created a fresh new folder under the same name (themeX), and put the updated theme files there.

After that, OJS is not working properly, i…e I cannot open pages: ojs/manager/setup/5 and page ojs/admin/settings to modify the look of the journal anymore. On accesing these two pages, nothing shows at all, just a blank page. Everything else (as far as I can tell) is working properly. I can even access other setup pages, such as ojs/manager/setup/4.

I tried clearing the data cache and the theme cache from the admin menue. but it did not help.

I have a backup of the server (not the OJS). How can I correct this issue? Should I restore the OJS files? Which folder? Or should I restore the OJS database? how?

OJS version 2.4.5.0

Thanks.

[edit] I also noticed that the page ojs/manager/plugins is also not accessible.

[ctgraham]

There is probably a PHP error in your new theme. You’ll want to look in your error logs to see where it is failing. See this FAQ:

When I click some button or follow some link, I'm left with a blank page. What do I do?

Check your webserver error log Usually, this indicates that a PHP error has occurred and the message has been sent to your web server or system log file. Check there – e.g. /var/log/apache/error.log, although the exact location will depend on your server configuration – for further details. Check your file permissions If you haven’t installed OJS yet, then the most likely cause is a problem with file permissions in your cache/ or cache/t_compile directories. See docs/README for information on…

Restoring the original theme files probably will get you up and running again quickly if desired; it’s unlikely there’s any database restore needed at this point.

[Dani]

Thanks for reply.

No the theme is fine. I was using it before with no problem, and even now it is working fine in rest of the pages.

the error log reads as: “PHP Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class themeXThemePlugin”.

I guess it was a permission error.
anyway, I restored a previous backup of the ojs folder and the problem was solved.

[ctgraham]

The PHP error indicates that OJS was finding two classes identically named as “themeXThemePlugin”. This could occur if the original theme was still present in another folder.

[Dani]

Can it be that the themeX folder was also in the cache folder and hence causing the error?
if yes, how can I clean cache in the future?
I tried deleting the cache folder, but it crashed OJS completely.

I tried CLEAR DATA and CLEAR CACHE options from within the ojs, but it did not help in the case of this issue.

[ctgraham]

I’m not aware of any native functionality that would create a copy of the class in the cache directory.

To find the offending file(s) if this were to happen again, use a search tool such as grep to look for the duplicate class definitions:
grep -r 'class themeXThemePlugin extends ThemePlugin' plugins/themes/

Using the options in OJS to clear the cache is appropriate. If you were to run across a situation where you needed to clear the cache without access to the UI, you could remove the files from the cache directory and subdirectories, leaving the directory structure intact.