Theme broken unexpectedly today

Hi there, we’re running a very old version of Newsmag (3.2). It has been stable for many years.

Today our theme layout seems to have broken and we’re trying to figure out why. Our site should have a black background and an ad loaded at the top next to the logo (along with some other changes), but it presently looks like this: https://imgur.com/iL2CxgB

We haven’t made any major plugin changes recently and we tried restarting our server. When checking the Newsmag Theme Status Panel, it said the theme was not activated (though I don’t know if this was normal or not). We re-activated the theme using our Purchase Code, but that also does not seem to have helped.

Any obvious places for additional troubleshooting?

We had some weirdness the other day with one of our old sites running Newsmag 3 also; the menus got rearranged oddly – suddenly the top bar was the main nav bar. I reset that easily, but only updates were on the web server itself for PHP 7x and such. This happened prior to the latest WordPress update today.

We’ve got one site migrated to NM5 and PHP 8.1 and minor pain; really just rebuilding home page elements, but code is a little cleaner now. Most of the tricky stuff now in the composer plugin, following the practice of stuff like elementor, etc. — way less file withing file within file and endless redirects like v3 (ahem).

Anyway: this only happened on (1) site; with NM3x (final version), and PHP 7.x. But scanned site for malware and nothing found, so chalking that up to some oddity on server. Not using ‘Visual Composer’ – only TagDiv Composer.

Good time to move to Newsmag v5, frankly.

Advisable, but I didn’t do it: turn debug on in the wp-config file to write error log into content folder; then check it for anything notable beyond deprecation warnings. 🙂