If you’re an avid reader of our blog, you will probably know that we love K2 – no – make that we’re in love with K2. It just makes our lives much easier and happier: we can extend it, we can easily migrate from one version of K2 to another, it doesn’t suffer from the […]

Note: This post only applies to Joomla websites using MySQL. Another note: This post only applies to Joomla 2.5 and lower. Joomla 3.x uses the InnoDB engine across the board by default. The majority of crashes on Joomla websites are caused by database issues, in particular, database corruption issues. For example, if the table #__session […]

We are recently getting a barrage of Joomla 3.2.1 websites that are hacked and need to be fixed. Obviously, someone cashed in on the recently announced vulnerability on Joomla 3.2.1, and fast! We are saying someone (and not some people), because 90% of those hacked websites have the exact same hack: the Google hack! (Or […]

We were commissioned, earlier this week, to integrate reCAPTCHA with JComments on a website belonging to a super-major news company. Large companies usually have 2 environments, one called dev (for development), and one called prod (for production). Our job was to make the reCAPTCHA work on the development environment, and then, once everything’s OK, move […]

We get constant calls from clients telling us that their Joomla websites were hacked, that they are seeing, in the User Manager, new and suspicious users every day, although they don’t have any registration form on their websites. We first comfort them by telling them that their websites are most likely not hacked and what […]

Yesterday evening we had a very interesting call from a new client. The new client told us that when trying to login to the frontend of his Joomla website, he’s always greeted with the following error message: “Username and password do not match or you do not have an account yet” He told us that […]

OK – this post is Part II because we have discussed the same exact issue before – however, the cause of the issue was different then. In fact, we knew there must be other reasons for this problem to happen, and, unfortunately, we were not disappointed… Earlier today a lady who has an apparel website […]

There’s been a lot of talk lately that PHP is dumping the mysql extension from its core, and how that move will impact major Content Management Systems such as Joomla, WordPres, and Drupal. First, let us explain, briefly, what this is all about… PHP, in its current incarnation, has several built-in extensions (or libraries) that […]

We had a phone call earlier this week from a client telling us that the IT department of his company wants to move the website from Joomla to Drupal. The client was actually the CFO of the company, and he was having a hard time understanding the real reason to switch the website to another […]

We get occasional requests from customers who don’t have access to a phpMyAdmin instance asking us to backup their whole database. Since we, at itoctopus, want to make the life of every Joomla website administrator easier, we are releasing the code for doing this, for free, for anyone to use! The code is below: <?php […]

Note: Please read this post entirely before taking any action. We occasionally get some developers calling us and asking us how to exclude extensions from showing up on the Extensions -> Extension Manager -> Update page. They usually tell us that the reason they want to do this is to prevent their clients from accidentally […]

This past Friday, we had a customer calling in and telling us that he just integrated Disqus (the famous commenting platform) on his Joomla website, but for some reason, every time someone makes a comment on one page, it appears on all the other pages. In other words, all the Disqus comments for that website […]

We got a call yesterday (well, technically, this morning) around 1:30 AM after midnight, it was a new client telling us that his Joomla website is completely messed up. He told us that all the modules are displaying on all the pages. We checked his website and we saw the problem: all published modules were […]

We get constant calls from Joomla administrators telling us that their Media Manager page (the one accessible from the backend by going to Content -> Media Manager) takes an awfully long time to fully load. We then ask them, “how many images do you have under the main images folder?”, and the answer ranges from […]

We constantly get clients who tell us that their website crashed after they have updated it. “And what did you update exactly?”, we ask them, and they reply that they have updated everything! And that’s the cause of the problem! Updating a Joomla website should never be done in one shot. The first thing that […]

Note: This post is a rant. What you will read here is our opinion of Joomla’s cache. There won’t be any “silver bullet” for fixing caching in Joomla in this post. There is one feature in Joomla that gives many Joomla administrators lots and lots of headaches. Can you guess what it is? Well, it’s […]

This is a fun, light post for many of our customers who ask us about the tools that we use for Joomla development. So, for those of you who are wondering, here is the list of tools that we use to work on Joomla sites: Total Commander: We use Total Commander to browse local files […]

Everyone talks about the benefits of using gzip on Joomla sites (you can enable it by logging in to the backend and going to Site -> Global Configuration -> Server, and then choosing “Yes” next to Gzip Page Compression), but nobody tells you the whole story. The whole story is that gzip, in general, only […]

Note: This post contains a core modification, which means that the next Joomla update may overwrite it. Another note: This post only applies to Joomla 2.5. The below will not work on Joomla 3.x. According to our customers, one of the most annoying features in Joomla is the checkout feature. Yes, this feature does the […]

Note: Make sure you backup your Joomla website before following the guide below. You should backup both the filesystem and the database. We are lately getting many Joomla 2.5.x websites with modified core to update to the latest version of Joomla. Obviously, this is a very delicate task because a Joomla update can (and most […]

We get a couple of call every week or so from new clients telling us that their Joomla website got penalized by Google. The first question that we ask them is: “Are you sure you got penalized?”, and the second question is: “How did you know you got penalized?”. The answer to the first question […]

We had a call earlier this week from a client telling us that whenever he tries to edit his Gantry template from Joomla’s backend, he gets a blank page. Hmmm! We tried to edit the Gantry template ourselves but we also got the blank page… Of course, there are many, many reasons that cause the […]

A new client called us today and told us that his Joomla website was penalized by Google. The client told us that his Joomla website slowly lost its rankings over the past few months, until it got penalized. We did a very quick investigation and we discovered that ever since Joomla 3.1 was out, our […]

Note: Before starting, we would like to explain what we mean by “files” in the title of this post. By files, we mean media files (such as images, videos, mp3s, etc…) and documents (such as PDF files and Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents, etc…). Another note: This post assumes that no file is linked to directly from outside […]

Using caching in Joomla will come back to haunt you. (Source: the team at itoctopus!) If you are using caching on your website, and we’re not even talking about page level caching, just global caching, you might have experienced some broken functionality here and there. Even if you haven’t noticed anything wrong on your website, […]

Let us start this post by explaining, in very concise terms, what is W3C compliance: W3C compliance is ensuring that the page has no HTML errors according to the W3C standards. W3C compliance has several benefits: It’s good for SEO: It is well known that Google, as well as other search engines, consider websites that […]

We love RSForm – it is by far the best form builder out there. We think that Joomla is blessed to have RSForm in the JED. One of the nicest things about RSForm is that it’s very flexible: there’s always a solution to whatever you want done, regardless of the complexity. OK – enough flirting! […]

Many Joomla administrators know how to hide hit tracking on a Joomla article – they can do this simply by clicking on the article title in the Article Manager, and then clicking on Options button on the top right, and then setting the value of Show Hits to Hide. Setting this value will automatically hide […]

On some occasions, you may wish to redirect specific users to specific pages when they login to your website. For example, if a user hasn’t logged in for a long time, then, you may want to redirect him to a specific page where he can see the latest additions to your website. Another example would […]

Ask any programmer what kind of work he dreads (and dislikes) most, and he’ll invariably answer you: “It has to be manual data entry”. Since we are programmers, then that answer applies to us as well. But hey, life isn’t always about doing the things that you love, sometimes, you’ll need to do things that […]

One of our clients, for whom we have just migrated a Joomla website for her small business, called us today and told us that she wanted to know how to add a new menu item to the Main Menu to point to a new article she has just created. We emailed her (while still on […]

So far this month, we have had 5 cases where all the users in a Joomla website had their usernames and passwords updated to the same value. In other words, all the usernames in those Joomla websites were set to admin, and all the passwords were set to an identical, md5 value. This type of […]

We are currently having an increasing number of cases where the 404 page – just the 404 page – is hacked. For example, when someone visits a page that doesn’t exist (on the Joomla website), he is either redirected to an obscene website or he just sees some obscene content on the Joomla website (or […]

Our clients (with previously hacked Joomla websites that we fixed) often ask us: “What can one do to have ultimate security on a Joomla website?” Our short and concise answer would be: “Have a development server and a production server. The development server is the one where you do the updates (and it’s usually behind […]

Cyber Monday is a huge online event in North America (the US and Canada). For those who don’t know what it is exactly, it is the Monday immediately after Thanksgiving, and during that day, online retailers offer huge discounts on their products. Cyber Monday has gotten extremely popular since its inception back in 2005 and […]

After migrating hundreds of Joomla websites from 1.5 to 2.5 (and dozens to 3.2), we have learned 2 things: A migration is never an easy task, and we have explained that, in details, here. VirtueMart is, by far, the most horrible extension to migrate. Since we have already discussed the first point before, let’s focus, […]

There are some Joomla websites that have a file called error_log in their root directory (e.g. directly under public_html). For some websites, the error_log file is a several hundred megabytes in size and it grows by a few megabytes everyday. So what is this file and is it necessary to have it? Let’s start with […]

While optimizing a large Joomla website this morning (the website had around 100,000 pages), we noticed that the website was considerably slower for logged-in users than for the general public. Most pages, on that particular website, were loading (after our optimization) in 0.2 to 0.3 seconds for visitors, but these same pages were taking nearly […]

If there is any non-core section of your Joomla website that is critical to its performance, it must be the template. Your Joomla template is loaded on every single page that is served to your visitors, which means that any performance issue on your template will negatively affect your visitors’ experience on your website. Here […]

Not a day goes by without us noticing this inconsistency in Joomla: it’s confusing, it’s weird, and it’s very dangerous. We know, you have no idea what we’re talking about at the moment. Let us explain… Login to the backend of your Joomla website, and then go to Site -> Global Configuration, and then click […]

A client called us today and told us that even though his website is loading properly, he’s noticing that the “Transferring Data…” message at the bottom left of Firefox is taking forever to disappear, as if Firefox hasn’t finished loading the page (when, again, the page is fully loaded). We knew immediately what the issue […]

At itoctopus, we love to share our knowledge about Joomla. We think that by doing so, we are helping Joomla become an even better CMS. We also like to share our knowledge because we believe in knowledge sharing as a concept that evolves our civilization in general (think about what would have happened if Thomas […]

Joomla websites are typically not used as blogs. However, it is very common for a Joomla website to have a blog. That blog is usually a Joomla category blog (some websites use the WordPress extension, but we don’t recommend it, since you’ll be maintaining 2 websites instead of one). Of course, once a Joomla website […]

Yes, it’s a very long title, but we couldn’t think of one that is more descriptive. Obviously, there’s a story to this, so relax, and let us tell you a bedtime story (it’s 11:31 PM here in Montreal). A client called us around 9 PM (about 2 hours ago), and told us that all of […]

Yes – we know – the title of this post is a bit weird. 20 tips to lose traffic? Well, we figured, if we explain what happens when things are done the wrong way then we’ll create a sense of awareness that’ll help many Joomla administrators to do things the right way, which is a […]

One of the things that Joomla sites must have (by default), and currently don’t, is RSS syndication. RSS syndication allows your content to be syndicated across the web, which means better exposure, which in turn means more traffic. We have no idea why Joomla doesn’t have this as a built-in functionality, and we’re almost sure […]

If we had a dime every time the IT Manager of a company asked us whether Joomla has version control or not, we’d be very, very rich! Like each us would have his own Bugatti Veyron rich. OK, you get the point… But we really do get asked a lot whether this feature exists or […]

The Marketing Manager of a large company called us today and told us that they were thinking of moving from Joomla to a custom, homemade CMS. He asked us about our opinion and whether we think they should go forward with the move or not. We told him that we highly recommend against this move, […]

One of our clients who wanted to switch to another hosting provider called us this morning and asked us whether Joomla requires the Zend Optimizer to run. Our immediate answer was “Do you mean Zend Optimizer? Or Zend Guard?”. He thought for a moment and answered that he’s not sure… We answered that he most […]

A major annoyance on a Joomla website (and on any other website, for that matter) is browser caching. Browser caching, in this day and age, is mainly about caching images, JavaScript files, and CSS files on the client’s end. Now, while browser caching significantly decreases the load time of a page on the client’s end […]