OJS not showing new journals, Error 500 and strange web page response

We are in the process of getting our journal project started and have encountered a strange problem. The first journal we created show’s a full webpage when visited from the main OJS page. Journals we have created since then yield Error 500’s and only render some header and footer text.

Figure 1 shows what our first Journal looks like:

Figure 2 shows what the rest look like:

We are running OJS 3.3.0.13 on RHEL 8.5. The Apache error is not very helpful but the PHP log shows:

“[07-Dec-2022 14:42:30 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function getOption() on null in /var/www/html/cache/t_compile/00a0a0910209607cb33eb0fe6474f30e99ed7^e64e579388e5615e11e939b12134d6ae8679eba6_0.app.frontendpagesindexJournal.php:37

Stack trace:

#0 /var/www/html/lib/pkp/lib/vendor/smarty/smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_template_resource_base.php(123): content_6377c78d3c78a6_42609869()

#1 /var/www/html/lib/pkp/lib/vendor/smarty/smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_template_compiled.php(114): Smarty_Template_Resource_Base->getRenderedTemplateCode()

#2 /var/www/html/lib/pkp/lib/vendor/smarty/smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_template.php(216): Smarty_Template_Compiled->render()

#3 /var/www/html/lib/pkp/lib/vendor/smarty/smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_templatebase.php(232): Smarty_Internal_Template->render()

#4 /var/www/html/lib/pkp/lib/vendor/smarty/smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_templatebase.php(134): Smarty_Internal_TemplateBase->_execute()

#5 /var/www/html/lib/pkp/classes/template/PKPTemplateManager.inc.php(1187): in /var/www/html/cache/t_compile/00a0a0910209607cb33eb0fe6474f30ed7399ed7^e64e579388e5615e11e939134d6ae8679eba6_0.app.frontendpagesindexJournal.php on line 37”

This is a fairly new install and we’ve only done some minor theming and uploaded a custom logo. The odd thing is this, the first journal works fine while the others do not. Has anybody seen this or know what direction we should point ourselves in trying to resolve the issue. Thank you in advance for any and all help!

Since you use different themes in the journals, you do not experience the problem you have in one of them in the other.

This is your test journal homepage

The changes you made to the theme seem to have caused problems.

Could you change the theme you are using and check again?

Thanks for the insight, we will look into it further. By the way the error page you are seeing how the site looks though our firewall/proxy device. The figure 2 I posted is what the site looks like behind the firewall/proxy. Thanks!

We are going to restore from a back-up to see if that fixes it.

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So our hosting provider doesn’t keep back ups far enough to correct the problem that way. I were considering replacing the install files on the server, basically doing the procedure you do for an upgrade. Do folks think that would work? Thanks again for your help!