Over the last couple of weeks the User profile pages on my production website bayjournal.com.au have undergone a slow death.

At first it was only the author tab. If it was turned on and you went in as me, the person who had wrote the bulk of articles the screen would clear. Then it was for everyone. Then the other tabs began to have the same problem when they were turned on and finally not even the headings or menus would work. Registration still works fine and nothing appears to be wrong when you look at at it through the administrator.

With the help of others on this forum, I was convinced that it was some kind of data corruption so I downloaded the entire database onto my local preproduction machine. No effect, it works perfectly.

I then systematically took out and re-installed all the modules, components and bots for yancc, joomlaboard and community builder one by one. No change.

Looked at every parameter I could think of but figured that it must be something I have missed.

Can someone advise me on the best way of doing a complete de install of all these components and reinstall without losing the user lists or the input to the forums?

Okay campers, I have fixed it! For the benefit of anyone else who has had or will have the problem, here is how I fixed it.

Just to recap, all but the heading would clear if I tried to see a user's profile. I had checked that all the database files were okay and had reloaded all the modules components and bots. Weird, especially because I could not get it to fault on my preproduction machine.

It came down to figuring out what was not common between the machines which lead me to thinking about the page template. Small variations had crept in and I thought if I carefully assessed each difference the answer may be lurking there.

It was. A lot of excess whitespace and extra carriage returns in my production HTML template somehow through CB into a tizz when it came to displaying the profiles. By simply taking out unneccessary lines, tabs and spaces in the template the profiles started to reappear!

CB was the only extension effected so be warned don't let your templates get too messy.

prehaps a default option of changing the CSS yourself would be more prudent. Given that I have a template that uses very basic color styles and core joomla elements most of these don't have any use in some templates other than text pecifications..

Given that new templates will be wanting to take advantage of DHTML, CSS 2 and other new features I would think that will play a part in future issues...

It's really easy to carefully edit across any styles you want and as an admin, I would prefer eveything worked first, so I can edit the CSS, weed out the bugs (hello IE)in the template to take advantage of precache and maintain the style that way...

Once I can see what does what initially, how the layout truly is structured I can be inspired to create simpler or more complex styles per module / component to fit my requirements.

I know "out of the box" is great if yoiu can do it, otherwise we would all be with phpnuke or the like, but template issues tend to have a mind of thier own especially as IE is lagging desperatly behind and I find myself constantly correcting IE render issues...

Post edited by: pcjunkie, at: 2006/07/10 12:19