Hi
Sorry this is a long story but I want to give you all the facts!
Yesterday I upgraded the site from Joomla 3.10 to Joomla 4.2.8. I had taken all the precautions, disabled the plugins which were highlighted as potential issues and backed up the whole site. The upgrade went well and both the site and the administrator page were fully working. There was only ONE issue: the Login module was throwing an error page "count(): argument #1 ($value) must be of type countable|array, null given". I believe this is caused by the template, Helix Ultimate (although I haven't seen this was any of the other sites I upgraded). It's not a major problem so I removed the Login link in the footer.
I reinstalled the extensions I had disabled (except Akeeba Backup and Admin Tools) and everything was still OK. I uninstalled the old versions of Akeeba Backup and Admin Tools and installed the new versions for Joomla 4. Then I ran the quick setup for Admin Tools. Everything seemed OK but soon after that the site was unavailable, showing the error page: "this site cannot provide a secure connection". I can't remember whether I checked the site immediately after that or not. The administrator page was still OK.
The site does not have an SSL certificate but I noted that the URL in the browser address bar was showing https:// and I could not change it to HTTP. The "Force HTTPS" setting in Joomla Global Config was set to "None".
A complication with this site is that I do not have access to the hosting account, so any examination/amendment of the files has to be done through a third party by email.
I asked the third party to check the configuration.php and .htaccess files for any issues relating to HTTPS. He reported that the configuration file showed "public $force_ssl = 0;" and also that there was a section in the .htaccess file relating to "Force HTTPS for certain pages". He sent a copy of both files and I could see the .htaccess was one created by Admin Tools. (I didn't set the htaccess maker). He tried commenting out the section on "Force HTTPS" but there was no result. I asked him to locate htaccess.txt and rename it to .htaccess and rename .htaccess to .htaccess.admintools. He did this and now the site is back but there are multiple problems and errors showing in the Console. Additionally the administrator page has lost all its CSS so is just HTML, which makes it very difficult to access anything. Screenshots attached.
So although we got the site back, it looks like I made things worse by asking him to swap out the two .htaccess files. Neither of us are experts or coders, so I need a clever person like you to assist. How can I fix it? Help!
Thanks,
Steve
