White Screen when Trying to Edit a Joomla Article: How to Fix

It’s Friday – time for everyone to relax a bit and plan for the weekend! Everyone, of course, except for us! We work 24/7/365! In fact, last Sunday, a client emailed us and told us that they have a problem when editing articles in Joomla’s backend: whenever they click on an article to edit it, they see a blank page.

Now a blank page is a sign of a fatal error somewhere, so naturally, we had to enable error reporting on the Joomla website. So we logged in to backend (of the website), and then we went to System -> Global Configuration, and then we clicked on the Server tab, and we changed Error Reporting to Maximum. We then tried to edit an article to see what the error was, and we saw this:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method WFBrowserHelper::getMediaFieldLink() in /plugins/system/jce/jce.php on line 37

Hmmm! It turned out to be an error with JCE, which is, by far, the best Joomla editor out there, but which is also extremely complex. The client was running the latest version of Joomla (3.6.2), and so we thought that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to uninstall JCE and then re-install it. And so we did, and then we tried to edit an article again (after clearing the Joomla cache and the browser cache, just in case), and this time it worked! It really worked! The client was happy that we solved the problem quickly and we were happy that it turned out to be a very easy fix!

But what caused this problem?

We don’t know – we think it might have been a compatibility issue between the JCE version that the client had and the latest version of Joomla, but we’re not really sure. The client didn’t mention when the problem started happening and we didn’t ask (now we’re kinda regretting this).

So, if you’re seeing a white screen when you’re trying to edit a Joomla article (or if you’re seeing the error above), then try uninstalling JCE and then reinstalling its latest version onto the website and see if that fixes the problem. If you don’t have JCE, then try updating the editor that you’re using. If you’re using a core Joomla editor (such as TinyMCE or CodeMirror), then it might be that the problem is caused by a 3rd party plugin that you have just installed – try disabling your plugins ones by one (starting with the one that has the highest ID) until you find the culprit. If you can’t find the culprit, then you can always contact us. We’ll fix the problem for you in as little time as possible and for a very reasonable price!

2 Responses to “White Screen when Trying to Edit a Joomla Article: How to Fix”
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  1. Comment by Finn Nielsen — April 30, 2017 @ 5:29 am

    In Joomla Please clear your browser cache. It solves the problem.

  2. Comment by Fadi — June 21, 2017 @ 4:34 am

    Hi Finn,

    Good suggestion – but please note that it works only in very limited scenarios. Nevertheless, it’s not a bad idea to try this before doing anything.

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