We have been working on Joomla for years, many years now! We have worked on Joomla sites from all calibers and we have dealt with many Joomla administrators. We think that we now have a clear understanding of the advantages of Joomla that made it one of the most popular content management system (CMS) on […]
At itoctopus, we like to share our knowledge with our readers. We’re one of the very few Joomla Consulting companies who are not afraid to do so for fear of educating competition or losing potential revenue. We would like, in this post, to share the secrets of debugging Joomla, the way we do it! Yes, […]
Joomla is one of the hottest CMSs in nearly every city in the world and Montreal is no different. But what is different for us is that we are based in Montreal. When a Montreal company (located downtown) calls us and asks to do some work on its Joomla website, we often do the work […]
We think that the title of this article should be “Where Is My Content Stored in Joomla?” instead of “Where Are My Articles stored” in Joomla, but since most Joomla administrators treat all the content on a particular page as a single article, we opted for the latter title, but the former title is technically […]
We all know that from a search engine perspective, words surrounded by the H1 tags are the ultimate keywords. Apparently, those who developed Joomla do not know this (yes – we are criticizing them!). That’s why they have elected to surround the titles of the articles with H2 tags, making them less important and diluting […]
You have created a new article and you want to display the title of that article inline – in other words, you don’t want Joomla to display the title of the article, but rather you want to add the title of the article yourself to the content area using the H1 tags. (Joomla, by default, […]
We worked lately on a very exciting project. The project consisted of integrating eFront, the well known Learning Management System (or LMS), with Joomla, the very famous Content Management System (CMS). In short our client wanted to do the following: Ensure that the users tables are synchronized, where Joomla is the master and eFront is […]
You’ve probably been there before: You notice something wrong on your Joomla website. (for example, a typo) You’re sure how to fix it. You search the database to see if the problem is there. You don’t find the problem there, so you’re now sure that the problem resides in the filesystem. A quick way to […]
In our job, we get a new odd and exciting problem to fix nearly every day, and that’s what keeps us motivated! Today was no different, as a new client told us that his Joomla website was hacked, but only for Google! So we asked him that how can such thing be possible, he told […]
Nearly every day, we have one or two clients calling us and telling us that they can’t login to the backend of their Joomla website. Usually, their problem is one of the following: They are seeing a completely blank page when they try to login to their Joomla website. In other words, they see the […]
Many Joomla website owners are often confused between the terms “Joomla Update”, “Joomla Upgrade”, and “Joomla Migration”: some of them think that they are all the same thing, some others think that an update is the same as an upgrade, but both are different form a migration. The absolute majority, however, does know that there […]
Every once in a while one of our clients asks us if there is a maximum number of articles/categories/users on his Joomla website – and if there’s a maximum, then what is it. Our answer is that there is a maximum, but there’s no way for that maximum to be reached in a single lifetime. […]
Nearly every other day we get a request from a customer to “fix PayPal” on his website. Usually the problem is one of the following: The customer adds a PayPal button to his Joomla website, but the PayPal button does not show up on the website. The customer adds a PayPal button to his Joomla […]
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 […]
This post discusses the issue of domain blacklisting when it comes to email. We’ve all been there: we send an email to one of our clients, we don’t get a response. We re-send the email, and we still don’t get a response. The same happens when sending an email to another client. At one point, […]
We were asked to do a very challenging task by one of our clients: He wanted to get the number of Facebook “likes” his website has on every page. Of course, this can be determined by simply placing a Facebook “Like” button on every page (using a simple content plugin), but our client wanted to […]
Sometimes you decide to upgrade your version of Joomla, and then after the upgrade is done, your website becomes completely unusable or some of its features become broken. Why does that happen, and how to revert back to a previous version of Joomla to undo the upgrade. Why a Joomla upgrade might break your website […]
Your Joomla website works perfectly on Firefox and Chrome – yet, for some reason, your website has at least one JavaScript warning on IE, which makes your website sound as if it’s unprofessional and/or insecure. This will most likely lower your conversions on your website. The reason of having a JavaScript error on Internet Explorer, […]
If you haven’t seen the error “Could Not Find an XML Setup File in the Package” when working on your Joomla website then most likely you have only used the basic features of Joomla (which means that you have not taken advantage of Joomla’s extensive extensions’ library), this is because this error exclusively shows up […]
We have lately developed a solution for one of our clients, whereby if one customer purchases anything from his (our client’s) Joomla website using PayPal, a new Joomla account for that person is automatically created based on the person’s name and email address entered in PayPal. Additionally, the person receives a notification email (to his […]
For one reason or the other, you might decide to remove the www part from the URLs of your Joomla website. It might be that you have a short domain and you may want to emphasize the shortness of the domain even more, or it might be that you just don’t like seeing www in […]
One of our clients Joomla website had weird error today. When going to http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/administrator, our client was getting redirected to the homepage. We thought the work was easy because it wasn’t the first time we have seen this problem, it was actually the second time. The first time we saw this problem (where our client’s […]
Split testing is probably one of the best tools that website owners/marketing managers can use to improve conversion rates from their sites. In this post, we will explain what split testing is (while highlighting its benefits) and how to use it on your Joomla website. What is split testing? Split testing (also called A/B testing) […]
You might have seen the “Error Reporting” field in your Joomla Configuration Settings, and you might have wondered what it is. In short, the “Error Reporting” field is responsible for controlling the display of errors on your Joomla website. In this post, we’ll discuss what should be the default error reporting on your website, when […]
One of our clients wanted to display a Flash intro on her Joomla website. She had the Flash intro but she didn’t know how to add it to the website – she wanted her visitors to first see the Flash intro and then get redirected to the actual Joomla website either automatically or by clicking […]
While working on one of our clients’ website (her version of Joomla was 1.5.14, but we think that this problem applies to all 1.5.x versions where x is less than 20), we noticed that the Menu Item Manager in Joomla’s backend had 0 men items, although the menu items existed as they were appearing on […]
One of the first questions that our new customers ask us is: “What is Joomla’s ideal hosting environment?”. They usually ask us this question out of frustration with their current hosting provider: they have done everything they could to optimize their Joomla website – they have even followed our advices on how to make a […]
We were working on a very weird problem on a Joomla website this afternoon. The owner of the website told us that he wanted his website to be “offline”, so he went to Joomla’s configuration settings and set the “Site Offline” flag to “Yes”. He told us that even though he did that, his website […]
Please note that this post will only show you to remove Joomla’s default favicon from your website. Check this post on how to add a favicon to your Joomla website. Many Joomla websites still have the default Joomla’s favicon (favorite icon). Of course, they don’t have it by choice, they have it because Joomla, by […]
One of the common questions that we get from owners of advanced Joomla websites is how to assign articles to multiple categories in Joomla. Our immediate answer to this question is that by default, Joomla does not allow assignment of an article to multiple categories (or sections). The answer we typically receive is “Why”, and […]
Let’s say that you are creating an article called “Privacy Policy” on your Joomla website. You add the article to your website, and the article’s URL becomes like this (if you have SEF enabled): http://www.yourjoomlawebsite.com/uncategorized/privacy-policy As you can see, the name of the category, which is uncategorized, is automatically added to the URL of the […]
We often do Joomla installation for our clients – usually the process is really fast. We first upload the zip file to the server, we extract it there, we create the database, and then we point our browser to http://ourclientjoomlawebsite.com, and we follow the installation process! That’s it! The process was always smooth for all […]
On one Sunday afternoon, you might decide to spend a lot of time browsing your Joomla website, just to make sure that all the pages are working fine. 15 minutes later, you see the following error: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 5298178 bytes) What happened for you to […]
We got a call yesterday from a potential client telling us that he wants to create an E-Commerce website and he heard that he can easily do that with Joomla. He wanted to do the job by himself and so he asked us if we can explain for him the process from scratch. And so […]
SQL Injection is the most dangerous hacking techniques out there. With SQL injection, a malicious attack can drop you a table or even a whole database in a few seconds and with a very simply command through your website. In this day and age, it is unacceptable for any website to have a SQL injection […]
Warning: This post is about removing content from your database, specifically your VirtueMart e-commerce/store tables. If this is not what you want then please stop reading now. itoctopus claims no responsibility (neither explicit nor implicit) whatsoever if you accidentally remove data that you later need. Before you begin you need to download a backup and […]
Yesterday, we worked on a website that was using Joomla 1.0.0. The owner of the website had three problems: Problem #1: The website was displaying “Your are not authorized to view this resource” on the homepage. Well, it wasn’t technically the homepage, as the website had a flash introduction that was redirecting to an article […]
We receive a call every other day from new clients telling us that one of their Joomla articles is not updating: They can see the updates in the backend, but the frontend does not show the updates. In most cases, there are three simple reasons behind this: The article is retrieved from the cache: When […]
A large percentage of our Joomla clients have their websites hosted with GoDaddy (GoDaddy is a very convenient hosting for many of our customers because this is where they bought their domains from), so we thought that writing a comprehensive and detailed post on how to manually install Joomla on a GoDaddy hosting would be […]
Let’s say that you own two Joomla websites, and you want to unify the login for these sites – in other words, whenever someone is logged in to one site, then you want him to be automatically logged in to the other. The process of unifying login across multiple is called “cookie migration”, and is […]
We just got a call from a new client. The client told us that he was suddenly seeing an error on every page of his Joomla website. The page still loads, but there is an error on every page that loads. It’s not the first time that we had such a call, and that’s why […]
Every week, we get about 2 requests from customers asking us to import their products’ database (in a CSV format) into VirtueMart on their Joomla website. Usually, every customer has the following 4 columns (fields) in his CSV file: Product Name Product Description Product Price Product Category The remaining columns differ based on the customer’s […]
One of our customers had a very odd problem that we fixed a couple of days ago: whenever someone tried to login to his frontend, he had to do it twice. The login worked from the first time in rare situations, but most of the times the person had to enter his username and password […]
We had a very interesting job today. A new client came to us, and told us that his Joomla website was not sending emails. We first thought that it was the settings that he had on his configuration, but everything was fine. His mail settings were correct, he was using “PHP Mailer” as Mailer and […]
We are currently working on a very interesting project. The project consists of a migration of a Joomla website to another sever, as well as several major fixes to the website. One of these “fixes” revolve around an RSForm Form, that doesn’t work. The form seems to submit, but then redirects back to itself (instead […]
Occasionally, one of our (potential) clients calls us and tells that he’s not able to edit the CSS file on his Joomla website. Usually, the client just wants to change a color or a font. Sometimes the client is not able to see the Template Manager section so he’s not even able to see the […]
Every since Joomla 2.5 was released last week, customers have been asking us this question: “Is it worth it to upgrade to Joomla 2.5?” That’s a very legitimate question. Our answer to this question is always like this: “It’s worth it as there are some features that are in Joomla 2.5 that do not exist […]
Every other week or so, we get a call from a (potential) client that goes like this: Client: “Hi!” Us: “Hi!”https://www.itoctopus.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=1329&message=1 Client: “I would like to make some edits to my database, and I want to know which Joomla file is the database.” Us: “Well sir, the database is not stored in any Joomla file, […]
In this post, we will list the most important tips that you can use to have a safe, fast, and efficient Joomla website. The tips are grouped into 3 categories: Security tips Performance tips General tips Important security tips for Joomla We have discussed before 10 security tips for your Joomla website. We will re-discuss […]
We have explained before how you can move your Joomla website from one server to another. That post, with minor modification, can be used to duplicate your Joomla website. However, we are going to explain the whole process from scratch to make it easier for you, our readers/customers. In short, the process is: Download your […]