Problems after moving a silverstripe website to a dev environment - php

Question

We have a silverstripe website that works ok in production on a centos webserver. I am asked to make modifications to this site and have to have a working copy on our internal Ubuntu dev server. The guy that did the website is long gone and no one knows this project.
I did the move, transfered the database and changed the config files to the new settings. Now whenever I start the site I get a full page or red errors:
FATAL ERROR: call_user_func_array() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given
At line 404 in /home/user/site/sapphire/core/ViewableData.php
call_user_func_array(Array,)
line 404 of ViewableData.php
ViewableData->XML_val(current_lang,,1)
line 4 of .cache.home.user.site.mysite.templates.Layout.PageAccueil.ss
include(/home/user/site/silverstripe-cache/.cache.home.user.site.mysite.templates.Layout.PageAccueil.ss)
line 197 of SSViewer.php
SSViewer->process(PageAccueil_Controller)
line 189 of SSViewer.php
SSViewer->process(PageAccueil_Controller)
line 296 of Controller.php
Controller->defaultAction(index,Array)
line 267 of Controller.php
Controller->run(Array)
line 22 of ModelAsController.php
ModelAsController->run(Array)
line 27 of RootURLController.php
RootURLController->run(Array)
line 104 of Director.php
Director::direct()
line 160 of main.php
As far as I know nothing is "weird" on our dev server and other frameworks (zend framework or even wordpress) work perfectly.
This is not with the latest version of silverstripe but trying to update it I ran into the same errors so I'd prefer have it work before updating it.
We are using silverstripe version 2.2.2.
Any helps or pointers are welcome!
edit: I did try to load the site with /dev/build/?flush=1 and /build/?flush=1 still get the same errors on theses pages. Also the cache files should be set correctly.

Answer 1

1) You might want to try ?flush=all (unless you've made any changes to the database, you don't need /dev/build)
2) My first guess would be the PHP version. Do you have the same version on both the old and the dev box? SS 2.2 doesn't work well with PHP 5.3 - if I remember correctly.
Running into issues when upgrading from 2.2 to 2.4 can happen - there were some changes but they should be relatively minor. If you haven't done the ?flush=all you might still get errors from the previous version.
Or you might even want to clear out the silverstripe cache directory manually (silverstripe-cache or if that doesn't exist a few directories down in /tmp). I always do that when copying my SS files from one server to another as old cache files can lead to very weird behavior...