phpMyAdmin Class ‘PMA_Message’ not found in /usr/share/ phpMyAdmin/libraries/ Error.class.php

I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%). In this category (stackoverflow) of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here.

My quesiton was:

I just got this error (no errors in phpMyAdmin for the last 2 years):

PHP Fatal error: Class ‘PMA_Message’ not found in /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/libraries/Error.class.php on line 24

I tried searching the net and links like

• http://gnuwhatimsaying.com/phpmyadmin-error-class-pma_message-not-found/ (changing the ownership of /var/lib/php/session/ folder to apache:apache – it’s already set like that)
• http://rakesh.sankar-b.com/2012/05/20/phpmyadmin-pma-message-class-not-found/ (quote: “I got a weird idea to see if the space is available for PHP to create sessions – gotcha, that is where my problem was. I cleaned up some unnecessary items and all went well.” – to be honest I don’t know what the author meant by this)

but none solved my issues, and strangely enough – these are only two links which pop up in the first 50 links of google search for this error. So, please shed some light on this.

Btw, the site which is hosted on this server works fine, DB works fine (mysql, login via SSH).

The answer, by Chris Muench, was:

I fixed this issue by restarting apache.

My comment on this answer was:

Thanks, in my case the reload was enough (service httpd reload)