Can't load main website or the Magento /admin page. Just loads as a blank page! Error log provided

Question

Our site has been down since I tried doing a backup of our Magento site. This was the last thing I did that could have triggered something. I had made other changes throughout the day, but only playing with some extensions, and this was a couple hours prior to the error. Below is the last entry to the error log:

[16-Jun-2015 18:42:56 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setLayer() on a non-object in **public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Block/Layer/View.php on line 134

Got into the line its calling to but have no idea what to do with it! Not even sure if this is the direct cause of this issue. I feel something should still load.

Could it be something simple I'm missing like a Maintenance flag?

Any other reasons why the site could be behaving like this? Quite frustrating that I cant even reach the admin page. All our other subdomain site work too.

Answer 1

It would appear to me that somewhere in your coding of some extensions you broke something. This error happens when you have what you think is an object but is actually not and you call a method on it.

for instance if you have something like the following

<?php
$obj = function_to_get_object('name');
$obj->getName();

if the function_to_get_object does not return an object but rather returns NULL or false then calling the method getName will fail because the variable is not an object rather NULL or FALSE.

I could not see this happening with a Magento install (without custom code) unless maybe you deleted a file or something and the base install cannot find the file to include or instantiate the object.