When doing a fresh install of SugarCRM on Dreamhost, I encountered an issue where the Admin Panel was displaying as though it was missing its style sheet, and the spacing on the Login page was all messed up. I poked around, but couldn’t find anything wrong with the style sheet or my install. I came across this post on the forums:
CSS not displaying correctly – solutions?
After reading through the forum post, I ran:
chmod -R o+rx themes/
The Admin Panel started displaying correctly again. Ok, half the problem solved, but there were still the Login screen issues. I dug around some more and found this great blog post by Angel Magaña on SugarCRM Troubleshooting: Formatting Woes. I followed his suggestion and ran:
chmod -R 755 cache
I reloaded the Login screen, and everything looked great. A few months later, I went back and ran an upgrade on this site. I used the Upgrade Wizard in the SugarCRM Admin Panel, and after applying the upgrade, everything went white. Needless to say, not the desired response. After a little digging, I ran:
clear cache/upgrade
and I was once again able to view the Admin Panel. So, if you are experiencing display issues with SugarCRM after install or upgrade, check the permissions on the /theme and /cache directories and clear the cache (especially the /upgrade directory).