We get many calls nowadays where clients ask us whether Joomla 1.5 is still supported or not. We answer that Joomla 1.5 is no longer officially supported – in fact, the official support for Joomla 1.5, including LTS (LTS stands for Long Term Support) ceased back in September of 2012. STS (Standard Term Support) ceased […]
One of the common questions we get from our customers is: “Why is it that my Joomla website doesn’t get the traffic that it deserves?” We take a look at their websites and then we answer their question. After a while, we discovered that the reasons why a Joomla website doesn’t get the traffic it […]
One of our clients was having a blank page when he was logging in to the backend of his Joomla website and so he turned to us for help. We enabled error reporting and we saw the following two errors: Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /libraries/openid/Auth/OpenID/Consumer.php on line […]
Some websites don’t have that much content – but they do have a lot of users. Such websites include charity websites, political websites, and some subscription websites. For these websites, it makes more sense to re-create the website from scratch in Joomla 2.5 (instead of migrating from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 – which can […]
We are currently migrating many Joomla websites to version 2.5 – in fact, migrations are taking the bulk of our time nowadays! Naturally, we are facing issues during these migrations, and one of the issues that we have faced today was in the RSForm extension; we easily migrated all the forms but we just couldn’t […]
We are currently migrating a large Joomla website with many pages to Joomla 2.5. Nearly every page has (unoptimized) links to other pages that look like the following: index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=[n]&Itemid=[m] Although the link above is not that pretty, it’s valid and it works. However, it only works before migrating the website (it will stop working after […]
After upgrading K2 of a Joomla website for a major international news agency to the latest version, we encountered the following error when testing the website: Fatal error: Call to undefined method K2ModelItemlist::getCategoryChilds() in /modules/mod_jxtc_k2contentwall/mod_jxtc_k2contentwall.php on line 133 Obviously, the error states that a function that is currently used (called getCategoryChilds) no longer exists in […]
We spent the past weekend working (yes, we work on weekends at itoctopus – in fact, we work all the time!) on two websites (each belonged to a high profile company in the US – one of them had 170,000 pages and the other had over a million pages indexed with Google). Both of these […]
If you have visited the Global Configuration page on a Joomla 2.5 website, then you might have noticed that there are now 2 types of caching: Conservative caching Progressive caching We often get calls from our clients asking us what kind of caching to use – we immediately tell them that they should enable the […]
We are migrating many Joomla websites (from version 1.5.x to the latest 2.5 version) these days and a common problem that we see is that once we finish the migration, and we make the website live, the “Save” button (as well as many button in the Joomla menu) stops working. This is normal – and […]
One of the little used Joomla official extensions out there is the wrapper component. The wrapper component has a very simple job to do: it includes a page from another website (or even from your website) into a page on your Joomla website. For example (this is just an example – yes, we know it’s […]
Usually we write about a recurring Joomla problem immediately – but for some reason we didn’t write about this error before, although we have seen it so many times before. But this afternoon, we got a call from a system administrator at a Fortune 500 company (a well known company making computer processors) saying that […]
Note 1: Validating fields on dynamically duplicated forms is too complex to explain in one post – and that’s why it’s not included here. If you want help on this, then please contact us. Note 2: We are assuming that you do not wish to save the fields in the database – if this is […]
We’re currently migrating a large news website from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 – and we’re facing some weird issues during the migration. For example, while we were able to migrate the articles successfully, clicking on any link (pointing to an article) resulted in the following error: 500 – JHtml: :icon not supported. File not […]
Note 1: If you don’t have RSForm Pro (e.g. you only have the free version of RS Form), then the below will not work for you. Note 2: This post is targeted at intermediate to advanced programmers. A Joomla administrator (unless he’s very technical) will be unable to do the below by himself. We love […]
A client called us today (around noon) and told us that he’s unable to install a Joomla extension on his website. He said that the installer is displaying an error. He gave us the information to his website (username and password of a super administrator) and emailed us the extension that he was trying to […]
One of the requirements on a project that we’re currently working on was to display PDF files on a Joomla website. This might seem very easy – except that the PDF document is stored in the database (instead of the filesystem) and must be displayed on a separate window and not inline. The process was […]
Nearly every day we get the following call from one of our client: “Hi – my Joomla website stopped working all of a sudden – I’m not even able to login to the backend! This is an emergency, can you help?” “Of course we can help!”, we answer, and even though we know the likely […]
A few members of our team at itoctopus are currently working on a highly dynamic eLearning Joomla website that has many components, and each of these component has several views. One of these components was unique in the sense that some of its views had a different layout when the item to be displayed had […]
We’re doing many migrations from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 after people discover (the hard way) that these migrations are not that easy at all! Most of the companies/individuals that we migrate their Joomla websites for have already tried to do the migration themselves by following the (incomplete and broken) guide on Joomla’s official website. […]
We have worked on so many projects (especially Joomla projects) for the past several years – these projects ranged in size from very small projects to large, governmental projects. From time to time, we have a project where the client asks us to sign an NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement) before starting the actual work. In many […]
Many of our clients use RSForm to dynamically generate forms on their Joomla websites. A client who was developing a form (using RSForm) very early in the morning today called us and asked us that he has a presentation this morning and he urgently needs to make a value in a dropdown box in his […]
We just started a large Joomla project with a local company (the company is located here in Montreal). The project consisted of customizing Joomla to fit the needs of a large NGO (we needed to create many extensions). In the first meeting that was held last week, we discussed with the company executives the project […]
One of our clients called us today and said: “Help! My Joomla website is not working! It is displaying code instead of my content!”. We checked his website and true enough, it was indeed displaying PHP code instead of displaying actual content. We’ve seen this problem before and we know that there are several reasons […]
We are currently working on a very large project (yes, we’re even working on the weekends) – this project consists of building a Joomla website from scratch for a government agency (many government agencies use Joomla – see why Joomla is a good choice for government websites). Naturally, the project has an SEO aspect – […]
Before we begin, we must stress that the “Undefined Index” message is a notice, and not an error – which means that it will not, by itself, stop your website from functioning, but its presence may be the indication of a serious problem, for example: menu not appearing, form not working, site not displaying information […]
This morning we worked on a bizarre project that was a very welcome challenge to our Joomla skills! The project was not hard: it consisted of modifying a custom made extension on a Norwegian healthcare website, and it was supposed to take us a maximum of 30 minutes, but instead, it took us the whole […]
Note: We know that this Joomla error has been covered in other places before – but in many cases, the solutions presented elsewhere do not solve the problem and none of the other places explains why this problem happens in the first place. We will try our best to present an actual solution that will […]
Earlie today, we worked on moving a Joomla website for one of our clients from one server (Network Solutions) to another. The move went smoothly and according to plan and the website functioned after the necessary modifications on the configuration.php file. However, when we tried to login to Joomla’s backend. We were greeted with the […]
We were working on a bilingual project today and we added the language switcher module to the top right of the website. The language switcher appeared for one language, but did not appear for the other. For example, when the website was in French, then we were able to see the language switcher on the […]
We have worked on many government websites powered by Joomla, either directly (through direct contracts with government agencies) or indirectly as sub-contractors. We always love working on government projects, mainly because the requirements are very clear upfront and they are usually very challenging! Today, the owner of a company for which we were sub-contracted to […]
One of our clients was trying to install an extension today (it was VirtueMart), and she told us that every time she tried to install that extension, she got a “No Data Received” error on Google Chrome. So we checked the problem ourselves, and sure enough, we had the same error. So we tried on […]
We are now recommending all our clients to migrate to Joomla 2.5. When we explain how hard it is to do this migration, we usually get one of the following answers: Tell us again, why should we migrate to Joomla 2.5? or Do we really need to migrate to Joomla 2.5? or Can’t we just […]
Note: This post is a bit advanced when it comes to Joomla – and is mainly targeted at developers who are developing an integrated solution for their clients using Joomla. So what is Joomla’s registry? Joomla’s registry is a temporary storage for variables that can be passed back and forth between different extensions on the […]
One of our top clients came to us today with the classic “invalid token when logging in to Joomla’s frontend” problem, we thought that it’ll be a straightforward fix, but like all these “token” problems, it wasn’t! Our client was using an extension called ExtendedReg, which extends the built-in registration extension by allowing the administrator […]
Up until recently, we were recommending our clients to keep using Joomla 1.5.26 until the end of the year, but we no longer recommend this. In fact, we are urging all our clients to migrate as soon as possible from Joomla 1.5.26 to Joomla 2.5.6 (or the latest version of Joomla, whatever it is). So, […]
Let’s say that you are building a form in Joomla, but you need one of your fields to be an HTML text editor instead of a normal textarea, how do yo do that? Well, it’s very simple in Joomla – if you’re building the form using MVC (Model-View-Controller), and you want to add a field […]
2 out of 3 times when we fix a hacked Joomla website, we discover that a backup of that Joomla website is either located in the root directory of the website, or worse, under a backup folder, which is, in its turn, located under the root directory. Some websites make it very easy for the […]
We have worked with weird Joomla problems before, but this problem took the concept of weirdness to a whole new level! Here’s what was happening: The .htaccess file is hacked (hacking the .htaccess file is common and is easily remediable) and is redirecting traffic to the website when using Google Chrome to google.com, while traffic […]
We are getting customers on a daily basis nowadays asking us to migrate their websites from Joomla 1.5.x to Joomla 2.5.x (we are also getting requests to migrate websites from Joomla 1.0.x to Joomla 2.5.x). Some of our customers inaccurately believe that it’s easy to migrate from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5, and think that […]
A major vulnerability on any website – and not just Joomla websites – is to have directory listing enabled. Directory listing is a default feature in Apache and IIS (the two most common web servers used for Joomla websites) that will allow anyone to view the list of files in a certain directory if the […]
A new customer called us today and told us that he’s not able to see the login form on the backend, so when he goes to http://ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/administrator/, he just doesn’t see anything at all. We were nearly confident that this problem will be very easy to fix because we’ve seen it many times before – […]
We got a call very early today from one of our clients telling us that whenever he tries to Joomla’s backend, he gets a “Component Not Found” error. The client used our Joomla emergency services because he called around 4 AM (it was a very active website and he needed to add new content before […]
Yesterday we had a client that told us that he was unable to login to his Joomla website. He told us that everytime he tries to login, he gets redirected back to the login page with no error! Since he was a technical person, he told us that he did a research on the subject […]
Setting the timezone is one of the trickiest things to do on any website, and while Joomla makes this easy for its users, it can still be very tricky. Let us explain why… Joomla allows the super administrator to change the website’s timezone in the configuration settings, by going to Site->Global Configuration->Server, and then changing […]
Every day we get at least one new customer who doesn’t have some key information about his website that will help us help him. This key information is usually a combination of username and password to his Joomla website. When we ask our new customer how come he doesn’t have this information, his answer is […]
In this post, we will discuss how real estate agents can use Joomla to build a website that serves their business. Before discussing which pages and functionalities should be included in such a website, let us examine what people expect when they visit the website of a real estate agent: They expect to search the […]
Some of our customers ask us “How long does it take for me to learn Joomla?” Of course, the first thing that you have in mind is how come these customers ask us about learning Joomla when they already have a Joomla website? Well, the thing is, there are many Joomla website owners out there […]
We have explained How to unlock a Joomla article before – and many of our clients and our readers benefited from our post – since we explained several ways on how to unlock any locked content on Joomla, whether it’s an article, a menu item, or a module. However, we got a question from one […]
We have discussed the Content Password plugin previously in a post explaining how to password protect a page in Joomla. Many of our readers have used it and have praised it. One of our customers, however, told us that he was seeing an “Internal Server Error” message when he uses this plugin on some of […]