Flushing Magento Cache breaks nav bar and links

Question

Today after updating an xml file on my magento installation, I performed a routine cache flush in the backend of magento. More specifically, I pressed the two buttons "Flush Magento Cache" and "Flush Cache Storage". To my chagrine, upon reloading my magento site, the top nav bar had disappeared, and all links to products had broken. As a first time Magento user, I feel rather underequipped to deal with this issue.

This problem has happened to me once before, shortly after the initial installation. Reinstalling the theme fixed it. Difference now is I've added a ton of products and other db changes, and don't have the db or files backed up. I'm afraid of reinstalling the theme in case I lose all the work I've done to the database and front end. Has anyone run into this before, and/or can anyone shed some light on what's going on and possible fixes? Please help!

Answer 1

Today after updating an xml file on my magento installation, I performed a routine cache flush in the backend of magento. <snip> now my site is broken.

Magento caches configuration xml and layout xml.

You cleared the cache after making changes and Magento is now broken.

After clearing the cache, Magento read your changes into the system.

Your xml changes are broken. Revert the files you changed back to the original files and clear the cache.

As a further note, yes, this happens all the time if I'm not careful of maintaining properly formed XML and researching how to change the files properly when working on configuration and layout files.

This is one reason for always flushing the cache after each change to layouts and templates. You catch your errors immediately instead of later after making a couple changes and not being able to remember which one porked your live e-commerce website. It's also the reason you make changes on a dev server, fully test them out and only after making sure they had the desired effect, upload them to the live server.