Do you have the Debug mode to Development? This should give you some errors if there are any being generated.

Also check your Reports and Logs section to see if there is anything out of the ordinary in the Logs. Errors logs should stand out when viewing them.

OK, I have the debug mode to development. There aren't any errors generated in the browser, when I go to the dahsboard -> reports -> logs, nothing relevant is generated.

Nevertheless I think that I start to understand something. Until you had written go to the log, I hadn't figured out that I could go to the dashboard by pasting index.php/dashboard in the url ( Sorry, I am a bit of a beginner ;-) )

Now that I have done this, it appears that the dashboard is horrible; it looks like early 90's html, so i suppose that concrete may not be able to access the CSS or access the wrong one or something similar. Also I had changed the main.css by hand to change the background and this edit has disappeared. I have checked on the server and the main.css I have uploaded is the right one.

Can somebody point out what to check next, some chmod issue, or something else?

Thanks in advance!

I have added a phpinfo in case it is useful...

http://www.grafito.co.uk/phpinfo...

please follow all instructions post here:

http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/installation/moving_a_site...

Thanks for the link, this is a very nice tutorial!

From memory, this is what I have done ( I did the database stuff afterward as I got an error message saying it couldn't connect to the database).

Since I went through a process of trial and error may be there is something I have missed and I will try to redo it tonight following this tutorial. i can't believe I didn't find it in the first instance, I have been failed by my google fu!

Thinking more about it:
When I have built the site I have tweaked the main.css Could this be the reason why?

Could it be the hosting company?

We need something asap, would uploading a clean install and redo the site online solve the issue?


Hmmmh, lots of question, thank you all for your attention.

Y

I have followed to the letter the new tutorial and I have reproduced exactly the same issue, what's next?

I don't know what to do.

Rebuild the website from scratch but online?

I have ruled out main.css being the culprit by trying the vanilla one and getting the same issues.

So to make a concise list of the "symptons":
- The edit bar does not appear anymore when I log in
- I can access the dashboard by entering the Url instead of clicking dasboard but when I get there the formatting is lost and I get plain text
-There aren't logs of errors
-Links to thumbnails in the Dashboard area are broken
-The host automatically adds an empty "cgi-bin" folder in the root that I can't delete.
-I changed manually the main.css to add a background image and this image does not appear on the live site but works OK on the local website.
-The galleria block we have added does not work anymore.

Anybody understands what is going on?

I have "chmod 777" all my files and now it works...

I suppose this is not best practice!

If somebody could point me toward some relevant tutorial or documentation to adopt a less crude approach, that would be appreciated!

http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/installation/file-directory-permissions

usually 755 will do it but like that doc says it depends on your setup, there's usually always a way around 777 which I always consider a BAD idea..