This afternoon a new client called us and told us that he’s not able to login to the backend of his Joomla website. While we’ve seen his exact problem before (he wasn’t able to login and no error was displayed), we were not able to fix it using our standard techniques. So we spent literally […]
We have mentioned before that we are migrating a lot of websites from using Joomla’s core content to K2 because K2 is simply better (well, this is our opinion anyway). But, even though K2 provides all the tools to make the content migration an easy task, quite often, there are quirks here and there that […]
We have been working on Joomla websites for a long time – so long that we have reached a point that we know the common errors in nearly every Joomla feature. Below are the top common errors that Joomla administrators face when they’re using the Media Manager (we’re also explaining how to fix them): Unable […]
An old client of ours called us yesterday evening and told us that his website was extremely slow to load. Our first guess was that it was hacked, but it was not; his website was very clean. What could it be? We then thought, well, maybe he has some huge queries running in the background […]
One of the most exciting things about owning a Joomla website is that one can build an e-commerce website in a very short period. Imagine that, it takes just a few days for you to sell your own products/services online and benefit from that huge market! But, unfortunately, in the real world, it’s not always […]
K2, for those who don’t know, is a powerful extension that can be used to completely replace Joomla’s own content management system. In other words, you no longer need to create Joomla articles and categories, you can just create K2 articles and categories. In fact, many of our customers use K2 and we are currently […]
Some of the very old websites that we migrate to Joomla 2.5 may show the following error on K2 or VirtueMart pages: JUser: :_load: Unable to load user with ID: 62 (Note that 62 might be another number, such as 42) The reason for the error is that the component is trying to load a […]
Many of the Joomla websites we work on have multithumb installed. Multithumb, in case you don’t know what it is, is a Joomla plugin that automatically converts images to thumbnails (or smaller images) so as not to break the layout of the page. In some cases, multithumb works perfectly, but in many cases, its settings […]
One of the projects we are currently working on is converting a website from using Joomla’s content to K2’s content. In other words, all the articles, categories, images, are migrated to K2 and the website must display all its content from K2. Additionally, all the modules that are using Joomla’s content must be modified to […]
Note 1: This post is targeted at system administrators with hands-on experience with MySQL. If you’re not a technical person, then please forward this post to your system administrator (you can always hire us if you don’t have one!). Note 2: You will need root access to your server’s shell to implement the instructions in […]
About 70% of the work we’re doing nowadays is migrating Joomla websites from version 1.5 to version 2.5. A common error that we get while migrating a template is the following: Fatal error: Cannot access protected property ContentViewArticle::$params We have seen the above error so many times so far that we now know the solution […]
Yes – we know – the title of this post couldn’t be more odd, but here’s the scenario: We were migrating a large website from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5. Nearly all of the content of the migrated website was created in K2 and the website was using sh404. The links on the old Joomla […]
You have probably seen the “Rebuild” button on the Menu Manager page on your Joomla website for some time, but most likely you haven’t pressed it – because you didn’t know what it is, and perhaps you thought: “Maybe it’s not such a good idea to press that button”. Well, we think you’re right! So, […]
We have so far resolved literally hundreds of cases where people were not able to login to their Joomla websites. Since our aim is to always make the life of a Joomla administrator as easy as possible, we have decided to list the top 10 reasons that result in the inability for one to login […]
One of our regular customers emailed us today and told us that the Media Manager on his Joomla website of his company is not working. He asked to take a look. We logged in to his website and we noticed that while the Media Manager page is loading properly, the upload functionality is not working. […]
We are currently finalizing the migration of a very large Joomla website at the moment (from 1.5 to 2.5). During the latest QA session, we discovered that the “Email this link to a friend” popup page (the page that pops up when you click on the email icon on any article) does not look properly […]
– Note 1: This post is about migrating modules’ data (such as settings, content, etc…) – it’s not about migrating the actual code. This post comes to help when you have lots of modules on your Joomla 1.5 website, and you don’t have time to manually migrate all the data for all these modules. – […]
We had a small task today where one of our clients told us that one of the pages on his Joomla website was taking a long time to load, and then eventually it was displaying a blank screen. We first thought that his website was hacked, but then, when we enabled error reporting, we saw […]
We don’t like to attack Joomla extensions, especially prominent ones. In fact, we can’t remember if we ever did attack an extension on our blog (if you know that we did that before, then please let us know in which post). But this morning something happened, something that made us choose sh404 – the famous […]
Quite often, we receive requests from our customers asking us to “fix” their SPF records on their Joomla websites. So, what is an SPF record, and why does a Joomla website need it? An SPF (SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework) record is a DNS entry that will tell other mail servers which IP (or […]
A new customer called us a few hours ago, and told us that his website was really slow. He told us that his website was hacked, and that his hosting company “fixed” the problem, but after they “fixed” the problem, his website became super slow. We thought that it might be a simple thing as […]
Note: This post assumes that you have migrated the K2 extension to the latest version on Joomla 1.5 prior to migrating to Joomla 2.5. We are currently working on a large, a very large migration project from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5. A mini-project in this migration project is migrating K2 content to the new […]
By default, the media manager in Joomla 2.5 allows a maximum upload size of 10 MB, which is ridiculous, since a high resolution picture can be bigger than 10 MB, and the smallest video with the smallest resolution (by today’s standards) can be at least 3 times that size. So, there must be a way […]
A new client called us today and told us that his website was hacked, and asked us to fix it. The moment we hung up the phone with him, we started working on it immediately (we treat such tasks as urgent). We did our regular check on its filesystem, and we didn’t discover anything! (even […]
When working on a major project on a Joomla website, we usually maximize the Joomla error reporting. This guarantees that not a single error, not even a notice, can go undetected and unfixed in our final work. One of the common notices that we see on major projects is the following: Notice: Undefined property: [extension_name]::$_state […]
It was around 3 AM in the morning – we were working hard on a project to meet a deadline that was set for next week, but we were stuck. The project consisted of a migration of a Joomla website from version 1.5 to version 2.5 – something that we have done hundreds of times […]
OK – we know that the title of this post is long – in fact, it is way too long, but we couldn’t find a better title for this very specific issue, so we decided that the title should be the same as the error message. While working on a Joomla website for one our […]
We occasionally get contacted by customers who complain about the trashing process in Joomla; they say that they just cannot empty the trash. When we get one of these calls, we tell the customer: “Are you sure you are really emptying the trash?” The reason why we say that is that in 99% of the […]
The project manager of a very large company that we do work for with called us this evening and told us that they are trying to update one of the modules, and while the change to that module seemed to take effect in the backend, that change wasn’t reflected in the frontend. This issue immediately […]
Most of our clients want to track the performance of their Joomla website – and what better way to track that performance than with Google Analytics? Google Analytics provides the website owner with a wealth of information about his website: how many visitors the websites gets per day, where these visitors are coming from, and […]
We’re currently having an increasing number of clients emailing us that they’re seeing the following error (repeated twice) on their homepage: Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: Permission denied in Unknown on line 0 The homepage doesn’t display anything else, just this message (again, the message is usually displayed twice). So, what is the cause […]
Some time ago, we have written a post on the best Joomla version – we said that is was Joomla 2.5 (in case you don’t have time to read the post). Since then, we had some of our customers ask us, “what is the worst Joomla version?” Before answering, you probably might think we are […]
Note: This post is targeted at absolute beginners in Joomla as we have noticed that the “global check-in not working” issue is extremely common for those who are very new to Joomla. We get regular calls from some of our customers who are very new to Joomla complaining that they cannot perform a global check-in […]
Some of our more technical clients tell us that they want to become certified in Joomla. They ask us if such a certification exists – and if it does – how can one become certified. Our answer is always as follows: There is no official certification in Joomla. There are some commercial companies offering certifications […]
We are getting an increasing number of requests from clients asking us to build a social networking website (à la Facebook – but on a smaller scale), with Joomla. Here’s how the first conversation between us and these clients goes: “Hello, my name is John Smith, and I was thinking you might be able to […]
Warning: Mootools is a well known (and very stable) JavaScript library that is used to support many client-side activities on Joomla. Disabling it/removing it (or replacing it with another library) might cause a lot of instability on your Joomla website and may render your Joomla website (especially its backend) completely inoperable. Please proceed carefully and, […]
Often these days, clients call us after we unhack their Joomla website and tell us that it’s still hacked! So we examine their website and discover that the website is clean. We communicate to them our results, and they get back to us shortly and they say that when they go to their website on […]
Note: This post only applies to Joomla 2.5. We got an email very early this morning from one of our regular customers. Here’s the email (minus, of course, our customer’s information): “Hi, I’m not able to reset my password. When I try to reset it using the password reminder tool I get the following error: […]
Yesterday we were working on the migration of a very old website. That website had a simple module that was programmed to display, on the website, whatever it had in the field JavaScript Code. As the name suggests, that field contained some JavaScript code. When we migrated the module to Joomla 2.5, we ran into […]
Note: This post is very advanced and is targeted at programmers. If you’re not a programmer, you can ask us to do the below for you. As of May of last year, we are often getting several hacked Joomla websites a day to clean. In this post, we are going to share with our readers/clients […]
One of our clients asked to add a shortcut icon to K2 in the top menu. As some might know, there’s a Joomla module that already does that, so we just downloaded that module and installed it and that was it! But we thought, what if such a module didn’t exist, or what if a […]
Very early in the morning today, one of our regular customers came to us and told us that his website was down because of a “missing field” in the jos_content (of course, jos_ was not his real prefix) table. We checked his website and we were greeted by an error complaining about an unknown column […]
Note: This post represents an opinion, our opinion, based on the work that we have done on Joomla for the year 2012. We get asked this question a lot: “What is the best Joomla version?” Back in 2011, we used to say it was Joomla 1.5 – but as of May of 2012, we had […]
We have discussed suPHP in a previous post, and explained why it should be avoided on Joomla websites because Apache must have full permissions on all files pertaining to Joomla (including core files), leading to major security issues in case there’s a tiny loophole in the Joomla instance. In that post, we stated that you […]
Most of the Joomla websites use suPHP, and yet most of the Joomla websites (with vulnerabilities, e.g. those with version less than the current one, or those that have vulnerable extensions installed) are getting hacked. Is that a coincidence? We think not, and we’ll explain why. What is suPHP anyway? suPHP is a tool that […]
A new client called us this afternoon and told us that he’s not able to save anything in the backend of his Joomla website. Articles, categories, menu items, modules, etc… are all not saving. He gave us his Joomla credentials, we logged in to his account, and we verified that he indeed had this problem: […]
While migrating a very old Joomla website to version 2.5, we ran into a compatibility issue between the default MooTools library that comes with Joomla 2.5 and a module (the module was mod_jxtc_k2contentwall, for those who really want to know). The module was expecting an older version of MooTools – but what it got was […]
A new customer approached us this evening with a problem that is very common on old Joomla versions, the annoying 404 error on the homepage. We thought, that’s odd, this is a very old problem, does it still exist on Joomla 3.0? It wasn’t surprising but it was just…odd! The first thing that we did […]
The images directory is considered to be a harmless directory – after all, what can it contain other than images and other downloadable content? In our experience, the images directory is not as innocent as it seems, in fact, it is, in our opinion, one of the most dangerous directories that can wreak havoc on […]
We got a call this afternoon from a very large company that outsource development work on its Joomla website to us. Everything works fine on their website, except for K2 attachments: a 404 error is display when someone clicks on any link to a K2 attachment. A quick research on the topic blamed one or […]