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You are using a bad quality JoomlaShine template. They are doing something really wrong: because they don't understand how PHP works, they accidentally end up trying to save the state of all plugins loaded on your site into the cache. This will break your site.

Short term solution: go to your site's backend, Global Configuration and set Caching to OFF.

Long term solution (simple): use a different template.

Long term solution (hard): contact the template developer and tell them that they must NOT cache the application object returned by JFactory::getApplication() because it contains the event dispatcher which, in turn, has the plugin objects. The plugin objects are meant to be transient and reloaded on each page load, even if the page is cached. By including the application object inside their objects they end up having Joomla! cache try to save the state of all plugins which actually breaks the site or fails completely when a plugin uses a closure (which is an encouraged practice in modern PHP - where "modern" means "best practices from 2010 onwards"). They should fix their template framework to avoid displaying this wrong behaviour. In fact, they should just call JFactory::getApplication() since it simply returns the cached object without any measurable impact on the application execution time.

If you decide to follow the hard solution please let them know that this answer comes from the same Nicholas Dionysopoulos who writes Akeeba Backup and has written a sizeable portion of Joomla! itself. They should have my email if they need to ask me follow-up questions.

Hi Mike,

I am using the JooStrap template which is a bare bones Bootstrap 3 template for Joomla. It's like a dragster: lightweight, blazing fast, not very forgiving to the unexperienced operator. It requires very thorough customization to make something beautiful, i.e. you end up doing templating the "right way". The great thing about this approach is that it never breaks when updating Joomla -there's not much PHP code to have issues with!- and it's blazing fast, again because there's so little PHP.

Then, there's chaos. Every template framework has a tonne of PHP code and all of that comes at a price in terms of execution speed, possibility that something breaks on update or straight up bad code having unintended results (as you painfully observed). I am not comfortable using any framework-based template but if I were absolutely forced to I would go to one of the established template providers like RocketTheme, JoomlArt etc. Their code is still heavy and they do have the occasional bad idea but it's usually with optional features. As a rule of thumb, if you have enabled the default Admin Tools configuration options, including the .htaccess Maker, and something doesn't work in a template: don't use that something because it'd be a security nightmare.

And a final tip. All template clubs have free templates which use their template framework. Try them on a dev site and see if you have problems, evaluate their performance etc. This is the best way to make an informed decision.

I hope that helps!