A friend asked me to update his site, but has no real information on Drupal or editing the site. Someone else built the site for him. He could not tell me how/where to login to the backend of the site. The site has not been updated in years, and is very broken. I am supposed to login and figure out whether it'll be easy to fix or not. (I assume that a couple years of not running updates is the biggest issue...)

I did some searching (not gonna lie- I haven't worked in Drupal yet, but have been working with Wordpress sites for years) and found that most people recommend trying http://www.yoursitename.com/?q=user/login. That worked to take me to a login page, but regardless of what I enter (he gave me numerous usernames and passwords that it "might be") it keeps giving me an error:
"The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later."

1) I can't tell if the login that I am seeing is the login for the Drupal backend of the site or the login for the forum that he had on the site (which is currently broken)?
2) I can't tell if he just gave me the wrong username/password?
3) Is there a different way to determine the login page for the Drupal backend?
4) Is it possible that the website is so broken that I can't even login at all?

Thanks for any insight.

Comments

onejam’s picture

Perhaps your installation is missing .htaccess file in webroot?

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Duvien

Jaypan’s picture

1) I can't tell if the login that I am seeing is the login for the Drupal backend of the site or the login for the forum that he had on the site (which is currently broken)?

It's the Drupal login.

2) I can't tell if he just gave me the wrong username/password?

That's not your problem

3) Is there a different way to determine the login page for the Drupal backend?

You have the right one. There is only one login in Drupal, the backend does not have a separate login. Drupal works on a system of permissions, so when you login, you are able to see the backend if you have permission to.

4) Is it possible that the website is so broken that I can't even login at all?

That's your problem.

Unfortunately, since you can't login, it's going to be really hard to debug your issue. If you can install drush you can run drush ws to find out what's in the Drupal logs, to hopefully get more information. Other than that, debugging this error is too hard to explain in a forum thread.

carolyn-van’s picture

Thanks. I feel like this site and it's issues may be too much for this Drupal-beginner to start with... I meet with my friend again tomorrow, so I'll see how attached he is to this old site and what direction he wants to go.