Joomla broken: [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Question

I have a test Joomla website for a live website I run on an addon domain on a different hosting server. I accidentally deleted the configuration.php and .htaccess file of the test website. Then I copied the configuration.php from the live website to the test website and put in the correct information again. However, it is giving me the error:

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

I'll go over the fields that I changed (or didn't change, but are significant- if it is a field that I did not change, I will mark it with an "*"):

public $dbtype = 'mysqli';*
public $host = 'localhost';*
public $user = 'SECRET[database user that I created and made an admin of the database]';
public $password = 'SECRET[password for the user I created]';
public $db = 'SECRET[user of the database is the one shown above]';
public $dbprefix = 'SECRET[same database, but had to create new users & new database name, but this didn't change]';*
public $live_site = 'SECRET[full URL to test website]';
public $secret = 'SECRET[not sure if I was supposed to change this]';*
public $gzip = '1';*
public $error_reporting = 'default';8
public $helpurl = 'http://help.joomla.org/proxy/index.php?option=com_help&keyref=Help{major}{minor}:{keyref}';*
public $ftp_host = 'SECRET[name of primary domain, the domain that this is on is an addon domain]';
public $ftp_port = '21';
public $ftp_user = 'SECRET[username I created specifically for this addon domain]';
public $ftp_pass = 'SECRET[password for the FTP username for this domain]';
public $ftp_root = 'SECRET[full path to the addon domain]';
public $ftp_enable = '0';*

My new .htaccess file has the standard information created by Joomla SEF with the PHP handler:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php

Any ideas?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Thanks! Figured it out, I checked the server logs, and these appeared in red:

[Thu Apr 17 13:52:00 2014] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] SecurityException in Application.cpp:530: Handler not found in configuration
[Thu Apr 17 13:52:00 2014] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] Caused by KeyNotFoundException in Configuration.cpp:275: Handler "application/x-httpd-php53" not found

Then I checked the hosting settings, and it was set to PHP 5.2, while I needed to be on 5.4+. I changed it to 5.4 then changed the .htaccess in the AddOn domain to ONLY (specifically had to delete other PHP handler) have:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php54 .php

Answer 2

Could it be wrong file permissions for the configuration.php -file? On unix the file should have permissions 644. Also check the file permission on the new .htaccess-file (should also be 644 I guess?)