One of the most annoying problems on Joomla websites is that saving articles can timeout (and display a 500 – Internal Server Error message) or can take an insane amount of time. This problem is not uncommon on large websites, and it typically gets worse every day. But why does this problem exist on a […]

Back in 2014, we presented a solution to a common Joomla problem then, where Joomla displays the mobile version of the template on the desktop (or vice versa). We stated that the problem was caused by the Joomla cache, which caches the mobile version of a page and displays it for both desktop and mobile […]

Note: In this post, by “core file” we mean a Joomla file that cannot be overridden at the template level. We have a somehow hawkish attitude when it comes to optimizing Joomla: we are not afraid of using core modifications (e.g. core hacks) to optimize/secure Joomla websites. For that, we are often criticized by some […]

As of version 1.6.0 (which was released 6 years ago in January of 2011), Joomla checks for the presence of a defines.php file at the main directory of the website. If it finds it, then it includes it. The defines.php file is not part of the Joomla core, it doesn’t even come packaged with Joomla. […]

A curious thing happened to us this morning while trying to update a supposedly small Joomla 2.5.28 website to 3.5.1. No – we didn’t suddenly develop xray vision, it was something even curiouser than that! Let us begin by explaining what we were doing… We were, as stated before, trying to update a small Joomla […]

Ever since the elevated permissions (or elevated privileges) exploit in Joomla versions less than 3.6.5 was made public, we are seeing weird things happening to the #__users table on hacked Joomla websites. These weird things can be any (or all) of the following: The usernames of all the users are changed to admin. All super […]