Joomla 3.8 & CiviCRM 4.7.x - front-end error 500 when logged in

Question

I upgraded Joomla to 3.8 on a test site and CiviCRM (4.7.24) seemed to work fine. I've now replicated the upgrade on a live server (a different config'd machine but both PHP 5.6.31) and while it seemed ok at first, after logging in as admin, certain Profile Edit & all Contribution CiviCRM pages give an Error 500 (the default Name and Address profile doesn't work - but a custom profile does). Dashboard seems to load fine.

I've checked another Joomla 3.8/Civi 4.6.31 site and am getting the same problem. As I've got a working 3.8/Civi am going to try and figure what's different between the installs, but meantime, thought I'd post in case anyone has something similar or any ideas.

Answer 1

It turns out this was down to the distribution of BSD on the broken servers was standard USA but PHP needed the PECL international library (https://pecl.php.net/package/intl).

Apparently without it, the collator in Array.php is returning a null rather than an exception and causing the error. But only in Joomla 3.8 it seems.

Dave at Digijuice suggested that ammending Array.php at line 534 as follows could fix the problem - which I include in case of use to anyone, but not sure if the problem is common enough to submit this as a change/issue?

public static function asort($array = array()) {
  $lcMessages = CRM_Utils_System::getUFLocale();

  if ($lcMessages && $lcMessages != 'en_US' && class_exists('Collator')) {
    $collator = new Collator($lcMessages . '.utf8');
      If($collator!==NULL) {
        $collator->asort($array); }
         else {
           asort($array);
         }
       }
    else {
      // This calls PHP's built-in asort().
      asort($array);
    }
return $array;
}