Restoring Broken CB Site

Hello,
Unfortunately, one of the sites I built was either hacked or suffered a major glitch. The result is that CB no longer displays -front or back end- and shows a "0 String could not be parsed as XML". This continues even after I reinstalled CB with the latest version.

The data seems to be all there and I can navigate to all CB submenus except the "Plugins Management" and any plugin menu. I get the same error. Hence, I have not been able to update any CB plugins. I don't know that that is where the glitch is. When I went to update the plugins and clicked on "update from web" the page showed the error and never came back.

In the admin home page, the CB updates module shows error with "string could not be parsed as XML"

In the CB control panel, where the latest version should show it says "There was a problem with the request."

I have ruled out any server issues, as an older backup works well on the server, and I further backed up the site and placed it on a server I have, which I know is working properly, and the site behaved the exact same way.

I have gone over as much as I can over the files and the database, trying to find something out of place, but it's like searching for a needle in a haystack.

My best guess is that something got deleted or corrupted, either a file or a database entry.

Could you help me find the issue? What do the version checking, update module and plugin update have in common? I've updated CB to today's version and that went well. CB Plugins are still older versions (7/2020).

Noteworthy:

• The site hadn't been updated since July, and the server it was on was on PHP 7.2 - though this could have been a door for the glitch /hack but it's not the problem now. I've updated the server (Apache & PHP) and it's working well now.
• Joomla and all components have been updated to the latest versions, except CB plugins which remain at July 2020 versions, which I can't get to.
• All the data seems to be there, and other components like Kunena, are working fine, including pulling CB profile images and data.
• I unpublished one by one all CB plugins (using phpMyAdmin) and there was no resolution.
• When I was first called for help, I put the site offline. The server was being very erratic and instead of saving the config.php file it erased it. I used a backup of the config file to restore it.

I would really appreciate any help.
Thank you,
Tomás

Sometimes, you just have to sleep on it.

I'm glad to say that, today the server was responding as it should and all updates were done with the site restored without having to resort to a backup and loose a day or so of data. Deleting cache was done several times, so I can't think it was that, surely the gremlin got tired and went home :laugh:

I also installed version pkg_communitybuilder_2.4.7+build.2021.01.11.18.11.18.403e0c931.zip which to my shock came with a bug warning, but in my case the bug seemed dormant, as I don't see any config issues.

Sorry for taking up time. All is good now.
Tomás

Even if you didn't get hit with the config reset bug please downgrade. The bug is in the plugin installer code so installing a plugin on that build will reset that plugins parameters.