We had an interesting case a couple of days ago, one of our clients came to us and told us that while installing Joomla on a new server, he got the following error (multiple times): Strict Standards: Accessing static property JCache::$_handler as non static in /web/vhosts/ourclientsdomainname.com/libraries/joomla/cache.php on line 420 It was not the first time […]
In some rare cases, you may want to run two (or more) different websites on a single Joomla installation, so you will have different databases but same filesystem. The reason for doing so is to maintain just one Joomla installation (e.g. upgrade, secure, host, etc…) instead of two ore more. At first glance, this seems […]
At one point or the other, you may want to do some major work on your website without jeopardizing your online presence. Obviously, you can’t work on your live Joomla website, you have to work on another copy of your website and then upload it back once all the work is done. There are two […]
Custom (or dynamic) forms are forms that website owners can create themselves. Website owners usually need custom forms to create the following types of forms: RSVP forms Quotation/inquiry forms “Tell us about you” forms etc… Unfortunately, Joomla, by default, does not offer administrators the flexibility to create their own custom forms, so what is the […]
We are regularly asked by our Joomla clients whether they can use a Joomla 1.5 template in Joomla 1.6 (or Joomla 1.7, for that matter). Our immediate answer is No, but… The reason we give this answer is because a Joomla 1.5 template work in Joomla 1.6 (or again, 1.7) is not impossible, but is […]
After the Joomla work we did in Qatar for a high profile school, we were contracted to do Joomla work for a major supermarket (that again, wanted to remain anonymous). The work included: – Installing a Joomla website. The latest version of Joomla was required. – Modifying a Joomla 1.5 template to make it compatible […]
Sometimes, you see a WordPress theme, and you wish there was a version for it in Joomla so you can use it on your website. You start thinking, is there an immediate way to make a WordPress theme work on a Joomla website? The straightforward answer is no. You can’t just make a few modifications […]
Every now and then, we have clients asking us how to remove the sample data in Joomla. The sample data is the data that the Joomla installer loads into your website during the installation process (note that the Joomla installer asks for your permission to do this). In any case, there are two ways to […]
Those who are experienced in website development and SEO know that when a website gets a virus, it will be deindexed (or at best lowered in rankings) if the virus remains for a long time, or, if the issue is transient, then new pages will no longer be indexed. Of course, search engines will forgive […]
Many of our customers are small to medium law firms, who want to expand or create their presence on the Internet. In the first case, our customers just want to expand their Joomla website to include features such as powerful newsletters or social networking. In the latter case, the customers don’t have a website yet, […]
In this article, we will discuss outsourcing for Joomla websites, its advantages and disadvantages. We will also conclude on whether or not you should outsource your Joomla development. Outsourcing means having someone do the programming work for you, even if you have some programming experience, typically for a cheaper price. Outsourcing, in all of its […]
In our small post on how to get the Joomla version, we mentioned that some website developers hide the Joomla version for security reasons. So what are these “security reasons” and how do they hide it? The main reason why some website developers hide the Joomla version is because there are malicious scripts running on […]
When we receive a support call from a new client, one of the questions that we usually ask is “Which version of Joomla are you using?” In many cases, the client doesn’t know the version, so we check his Joomla website to find out which version he’s using ourselves. What we do is that we […]
We regularly have clients coming to us and telling us that they are unable to install an extension on their Joomla website. An extension, as most of you would probably know, is any plugin, module, or component. So imagine if you are about to install a simple plugin to display the current temperature on your […]
At itoctopus, we receive a lot of Joomla jobs, a lot of more jobs than other CMS’s, which means that Joomla is very popular. But why is Joomla that popular? We think there are many reasons for Joomla’s popularity, including: It is very easy to build a basic website with Joomla that anyone with little […]
We had a weird case today. One of our clients came to us and told us that one of his Joomla websites got hacked, and he sent us some links on his website, containing some obscene content, links to malicious websites, and of course, malicious JavaScript that will probably install a spware/adware/virus on one’s PC […]
Literally every week we either receive a phone call or an email from a client telling us that one of his articles is now marked as “checked out” and is locked for editing. They tell us that they’re unable to unlock these articles to edit them. They then ask, why was the article locked in […]
Sometimes, we have some business owners or even IT Managers in non IT companies (such as law firms) asking us about Joomla. The first and most important question they ask us “Is Joomla a good choice?” Our answer is, as always, it depends. We tell our customers that Joomla is a good choice if: You’re […]
We were in Qatar a couple of weeks working on a huge Joomla website. The website was for a portal for a school (unfortunately the agreement states that we cannot mention the school name on our website). This is the second largest website we’ve done in Qatar, the first one was a non-Joomla website we’ve […]
We have had a few jobs to make Joomla work with Oracle instead of MySQL, and we can say for sure that it’s not a job for beginners. Yes, Joomla can work with Oracle as a database, but the problem is that it needs modification in its core for it to be able to do […]
A question that many of our clients ask is the following: “How many users can my Joomla website handle?” Our answer is: The number of users that your Joomla website can handle depends on the following: – The server you’re hosting your website with. – The number of extensions you have activated on your website. […]
In this post, we have decided to answer 3 common questions that our clients ask us about the location of files/data in Joomla. We hope that this post will help everyone! Where is php.ini in Joomla? php.ini is a PHP system file, and has nothing to do with your Joomla website. php.ini is usually located […]
Most of our jobs dealing with securing a Joomla website by removing all potential security threats have to deal with Acunetix. Usually, our customers come to us with either an Acunetix report or ask us to run an Acunetix scan on their Joomla website. Typically, here are the couple of critical vulnerabilities that we find: […]
As we all know, there’s a caching functionality on Joomla that is activated on most websites. This caching speeds up the website, while ensuring that the freshness of the content is not affected, because Joomla’s default caching only caches php code, and not the content itself. A question on many Joomla website owners is “When […]
Note: This post applies to Joomla 1.5. If you have Joomla 1.6, then please contact us, as the procedure is different. Nearly every day we are contacted by one or more of our customers who tell us the following: I have tried to add Javascript code to my website, but it doesn’t work. It seems […]
While Joomla is a very poweful CMS, sometimes it feels as if it lacks some basic features. For example, many of our customers ask us what sort of settings they should change in order to automatically notify their registered users (subscribers) of a new article that is posted on their Joomla website. Our answer is […]
If you stumbled across this article because you need emergency help for your Joomla website, then please contact us at our emergency number which is 514 961 2804 (for US callers) or +1 514 961 2804 (for international callers). Update January 2018: Please note that the Joomla emergency service is now strictly available for enterprise […]
Everyone loves favicons, they imply professionalism, seriousness, and continuity of the website and the underlying business (Note: itoctopus still doesn’t have a favicon because we are still working on our corporate identity). As such, a lot of our Joomla customers want to know the procedure for adding a favorite icon (aka favicon) to their website. […]
We had an interesting project yesterday, which consisted of customizing Docman (a Joomla extension that allows you to distribute documents either for free or for a fee on your website) in order to accept subscriptions. Here’s what the client wanted: – If the document is priced at 0, then the registered member can download it […]
First we apologize that this post is very technical, but this is a recurring issue and we thought we’d share the solution with others that may be experiencing this problem. The easiest way to retrieve the information of the current logged in user in Joomla is the following: $user =& JFactory::getUser(); But there is a […]
Often, we receive requests for adding new attributes (or fields) to the user registration form in Joomla. Such attributes are usually specific to our client’s industry. A very recent example is a client of ours who runs a small magazine, and wanted to add the following 2 fields: “Registered” (which is of type boolean) and […]
Not a week goes by without us receiving at least 3 requests to move a Joomla website from one server to the other (or from one hosting account to another). Generally, the process is straightforward, and can be done in 3 methods: Method 1 This method is the easiest one and the most straightforward, and […]
We have worked on many Joomla websites for many customers covering nearly every profession anyone can think of. All of our customers’ websites are great when it comes to content, but most of them are not that great when it comes to design. Some of them are very ugly, and yes, we do tell our […]
Some of our potential clients already have hosting plans on Windows Servers, and they prefer not to switch as they are already familiar with the system, so they come to us and ask us “Can I run Joomla on a Windows Server?” Our answer is: “Of course you can”. Joomla can run on a Windows […]
Many of our clients, who already have a Joomla website, reach a point where they want to sell products and/or services on their websites. They all come to us with this immediate question: “Is Joomla good for ecommerce?”. Our answer is always: “It depends”. Yes, whether Joomla is good or not for ecommerce depends on […]
Joomla is highly criticized of being slow. We can say, with confidence, that this criticism has grounds. Joomla is indeed slow. This is because Joomla is a very complex CMS and there’s a lot of code that is executed in order to display even the “about us” page of a website. So, what can you […]
Sometimes, you feel that you are obliged to block a certain IP from accessing your Joomla website. Reasons may include: The IP is hacking your website. The IP is scraping content from your website. The IP is attacking your website with a lot of requests. The IP is continuously spamming your website. The IP is […]
Sometimes, even the seemingly easiest things are very complicated to in Joomla. One of these easy, yet complicated things to do, is creating a Logout menu item in Joomla. We had this request several times so we thought it would be helpful to share how to do it. Note that the below applies to both […]
We have at least 3 times every week where a customer comes to us with a hacked Joomla website. Usually, the Joomla website will be either filled with hidden malicious content, is redirected to another website with malicious content, has all its data erased, or is simply does not show up. Here are, according to […]
While the absolute majority of our customers already have Joomla websites, some of them don’t even have a website and want us to create a website for them using Joomla, or have a website yet or they are using another CMS and they want us to move them to Joomla. These customers ask for Joomla […]
In some situations, you may find yourself forced to change the database password of your Joomla website. Such situations include: Your website just got hacked. You gave all the website credentials (particularly the username and the password of the database) to a developer that you no longer trust. You have a good habit of changing […]
Sometimes one of your Joomla database tables (jos_*) , or even your whole Joomla database can become corrupt because of the following: – Hardware failure on your server (you should always pray that this never happens on your server, and if it does, then you should pray that you have a recent backup) – Someone […]
Some of our clients come to us with requests to add a marquee to their Joomla website. Although we always want to have more work, we tell them to do this themselves. Why? Because it’s really easy! All you need to do is to add the following to the text that you want to have […]
Some of our clients ask us to add background musing on their Joomla website. Typical requirements include: I want to play Song X on my website. I want the music to play on all browsers. I don’t want the music to stop if the person moves from one page to the other. Playing music is […]
Website security has always been a hot topic, and now it’s even a hotter topic as security standards, such as PCI-DSS, are becoming required by credit card companies as well as internal security auditors (especially in schools, universities, and other websites). As a result, we are currently experiencing a surge in projects consisting of securing […]
We have previously examined a problem where one of our clients was not able to login to the administrator’s control panel, and we have concluded that the root of the problem is that PHP was unable to write the session information to the filesystem because it doesn’t have the proper permissions. This problem often happens […]
There are many reasons why someone would want to accept a payment on his website, including: – He might be selling a product – He might be selling a service – He might be accepting donation But if that someone happens to run a Joomla website, how an he accept payments? Like everything in life, […]
One of Joomla’s interesting (and common) problems is when a user logs in to Joomla’s administrator’s control panel only to be greeted by a blank page instead of seeing Joomla’s control panel. The blank page doesn’t have any code in it, at all, not even the <html> and the <body> tags. So what’s going on? […]
If you’re reading this post then probably the following has happened (or is currently happening) to you: – You disable a module (or change a template, or disable/enable/update any extension). – You go to your website and check if the module is no longer there. – You still see the module. – You go back […]
One of our little projects today was interesting. The owner of the website was not able to login to his Joomla’s Administrator. Here is what we knew about the problem when we first started working on it: – The website was using Joomla 1.0x (which is more Mambo than Joomla). – The owner of the […]