All JomSocial Links Redirect to the Profile Page: How to Fix!

There are several components that are highly complex, and JomSocial is definitely one of them. That’s why when our clients see that they have a problem on it, they don’t bother resolving it themselves, mainly because they know it’s going to be very complicated, and that it may take them days before they can find a solution (or before they completely give up). When they have a problem with JomSocial, they simply call us!

Today was no different. One of our regular customers called us and asked us to fix a problem with JomSocial. The problem was that when the person was logged in to Joomla, all the JomSocial links (including “Friends”, “Groups”, “Photos”, “Videos”, etc…) were redirecting to the profile page. We were able to recreate the problem, but we noticed that the problem disappeared when Joomla’s SEF was disabled, which meant that the problem had to do with the links themselves (again, the links were working and were changing, but they were all redirecting to the profile page – they weren’t returning any 404 errors).

We did a research on the subject and there were many solutions that involved either hacking Joomla’s core or heavily modifying JomSocial code (none of these solutions were confirmed to be working by more than one person, by the way). We suspected that there must be a better way to fix the problem since our client’s website was a Joomla 1.5 website with almost exclusively standard extensions (if there’s a problem with JomSocial on his website, then there must be a problem with JomSocial on every website – which is not the case – which means that the problem lies somewhere with this settings).

We then noticed that our client didn’t have a Menu Item in his main menu pointing to JomSocial – which shouldn’t be the case. In order for SEF to work properly, JomSocial must have a Menu Item in the main menu (the menu that has the default page of the website – or the homepage). So, we created a Menu Item of type “JomSocial -> FrontPage -> Home”. We gave the Menu Item the Special access level and we set its alias to connect. That solved the problem! (The photos link on JomSocial became something like http://[domain name of our client’s Joomla website]/connect/4594-[name of the person]/photos)

However, we were left with a small issue – we didn’t want JomSocial to appear in the Main Menu, so we did a little trick in the settings of the Menu Item. We changed the class of that menu item to the following:

" style="display:none;

The first quote in the above code closes the opening quote for the default class, and the style="display: none; will ensure that the menu item will not be displayed. Notice that there’s no closing quote since the closing quote of the original Menu Item css class will be used to close the style tag. This has worked well! Here’s the end result:

<li class="item1609 root" style="display:none;" >
	<a class="orphan item bullet" href="/connect"  >
		<span>jomsocial</span>
	</a>
</li>

As you can see from the above, our little trick ensured that the list item (li) tag was hidden.

Again, we know that JomSocial can be very intimidating, so if you have the above problem or any JomSocial problem that you need help solving, then we’re here to help. Just contact us and we’ll fix your problem in no time! Oh, and our prices are very competitive and we are very, very friendly!