Troubleshooting a Broken Evolution CMS Site After Moving to a New Host

Migrations fail in messy ways. The donor case came from an Evolution CMS 3.1.8 site that behaved badly after a move to a new host, showing vague errors in the manager and strange output that did not immediately explain the root cause.

The useful lesson here is not one magical fix. It is the migration debugging order.

What to check first after a bad move

• manager/includes/config.inc.php and related environment-specific config values.
• Host, protocol, and path assumptions carried over from the old server.
• Mailer and reset-link behavior if the new host changes URL or scheme handling.
• Browser and server logs instead of relying only on generic manager error text.

When a moved site starts emitting confusing errors, configuration drift is usually a more likely cause than random code breakage. Treat the migration as an environment mismatch problem first, and the investigation becomes much more focused.