We had an interesting case today – a client of ours told us that whenever he tries to login to the administrator section of his website, he was seeing phpMyAdmin‘s login page instead of Joomla’s regular administrator login page. At first, we thought we misunderstood what the client said, but it didn’t take us long […]

A regular client called us a week ago and told us that, after moving his Joomla website to a larger hard drive, it started crashing constantly. We checked the load on his server and it was super high (in the double digits) which explained the constant crashing, but didn’t really reveal the root cause. So, […]

For the somewhat technically savvy, the title of this post may seem like an oxymoron: Joomla 3.x should run very well on any PHP version ranging from 5.3.10 through version 7! So why should it have a problem with PHP 5.5 (or higher versions of PHP)? To answer this question, let us tell you a […]

We received the following email from a client yesterday: “I’ve had a problem for about a year with my company website. It makes me attempt the login 3-5 times before getting into the backend, and then when I’m in, I have to save any change I make to the site either 2, 3, or 4 […]

A high traffic law news website that we have worked on many times had a long-time problem with Google News – a problem that we were made aware of a few weeks ago. It wasn’t a serious problem, but it was quite annoying: whenever they posted a new article on the website, Google News would […]

Note: The solution presented in this post consists of a core modification. Core modifications may be wiped out with future Joomla updates. Please keep that in mind should you decide to implement it. Last Thursday, a regular reader of a client’s website emailed our client and told them that whenever he likes an article on […]

When you start delving into the wonderful world of Joomla, you will soon know that it has many mysteries; some of which you are curious to know everything about, others of which you prefer to leave alone. In the latter category, we can think of one mystery, the Redirect Manager‘s Advanced Mode. Before explaining what […]

Note: This post is very advanced, and requires some Linux shell experience. If you feel that your experience is not up to the suggestions below, then we suggest that you ask some experts to do it for you. Another note: Please read the post to the end before performing any work. Recently, Apache‘s ModSecurity has […]

We had a curious case last week. A client called us and told us that his website’s K2 RSS feed was not working. He was using FeedBurner, and he told us that it (FeedBurner) was displaying content that was weeks old instead of displaying the fresh content from his website. So, we checked the website […]

If you’re an avid reader of our blog, then you may already know that we’re not huge fans of sh404SEF. In fact, we have gained expertise in getting rid of it on large websites. So when something wrong happens to a website that has sh40SEF installed, we immediately suspect this notorious extension, and usually, we […]

A client of hours with a high traffic Joomla website called us and told us that everyday during peak hours, their website slowed to a crawl. So, as usual, we ssh’d to their server and we checked the slow query log and we didn’t notice anything unusual, which was unusual (even though the long-query-time was […]

We were busy most of the month doing emergency updates for our clients since Joomla had several critical updates in a row. Most updates went smoothly, but several didn’t. One update, for example, caused the following error to display on the homepage: DateTime::__construct(): Failed to parse time string (Never) at position 0 (N): The timezone […]

A new client of ours emailed us and told us that whenever he visits his website, he’s seeing the following error: The connection was reset. The above error is displayed when he’s using FireFox. When he uses Chrome, his website also crashes but with the following (different) error: No data received Now, we worked on […]

Note: This post is slightly oriented for programmers. We just wanted to let you know before reading it in case you found it a bit too technical for your taste! Another note: The solution presented in this post requires a core modification since it is addressing a bug in Joomla’s core. Proceed with caution and […]

A client of ours, running a Joomla 3.4.6 website and not wanting to update to the seemingly rushed 3.4.7 asked us to update the PHP instance powering his website from PHP 5.4.44 (which has a known exploit when it comes to the serialization and unserialization of data) to close all known exploits on his server. […]

Note: The guide described in this post, although straightforward, is probably better performed by a system administrator as there’s always a chance of a glitch while tinkering with the server’s Apache and PHP installations. Last week, we were commissioned to create a microsite for a large clients of ours. The microsite consisted of copying a […]

This very morning, the head administrator of a Joomla intranet website belonging to an extremely reputable university in the US Northeast (that university is a client of ours), called us and told us that whenever he goes to the Article Manager page on Joomla’s backend, he sees a blank page (despite the fact that his […]

OK – we have to admit it. We’re paranoid and we’re afraid of our own shadows, we’re also afraid of clowns (they really are scary), adult strangers talking to us in the streets, and, of course, being sucked down the bathtub drain (baths are always a nightmare). But our greatest fear is seeing a client’s […]

A client of us called us and told us that they were were experiencing huge slowdowns when using JComments in the backend – such slowdowns were affecting the whole website and sometimes lasting for several minutes! After a quick investigation in the slow query log, we were able to isolate the 3 queries causing the […]

Note: This post assumes you have cPanel access to your website. The instructions for other hosting interfaces are different and are not covered in this post. Warning: The method described in this post will wipe out any core modifications that you might have on your Joomla website. You have been warned! Another warning: As explained […]

Ah search plugins, we love them, we truly do! Every time we get a job to create a search plugin we fight amongst ourselves as to who will create this plugin! We have created search plugins that will search core Joomla tables, non-core Joomla tables, specific modules, etc… We even created search plugins that will […]

Note: This post is about updating a Joomla website, and not migrating it. See the difference between the two here. A few weeks ago, Joomla released Joomla 3.4.5, which is a critical security update that closes a SQL injection exploit existing in previous versions of Joomla. At the time of its release, we got so […]

A client of ours emailed us a few days ago and told us that whenever he tries to access his website, he’s seeing the following error: Bad Request: Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Size of a request header field exceeds server limit. He told us that he was the […]

At itoctopus, we test our clients’ Joomla websites constantly, so much that we have developed Joomla plugins that will help us in the testing. One of the plugins that we have developed and that we constantly use is the Super Login plugin, which allows us to login as any user to the Joomla website with […]

We had a very curious case today: an occasional customer of ours emailed us and told us that for the past few months they weren’t able to see the administrator menu in the backend. They temporarily addressed the problem by installing an extension called Admin Menu Manager, which provided an alternative for generating the admin […]

A substantial chunk of our work consists of optimizing Joomla websites. As such, we have gathered over the years a vast experience in that particular field and we almost know every variation of the problem as well as its causes. In this post, we would like to share our knowledge with our readers by providing […]

We had a client today complaining that when he clicks on the New button in Joomla’s Article Manager page, he has to wait for a long time for the Add New Article page to appear (the problem also happens when he clicks on an existing article in the Article Manager page to edit it). We […]

Note: The solution presented in this post requires a core modification. As you may probably know by now, core modifications are delicate and may be wiped out with the next Joomla update. Please proceed with caution if you elect to implement the below. If you’re running a high traffic Joomla website, then you probably have […]

Late last night, a new client called us and told us that he can’t login to his Joomla website; that he’s being redirected to the login page with no errors when he logs in with either correct or wrong credentials. Of course, we’ve seen this issue several times, and so we thought it was an […]

For the past few days, we were working on optimizing a super large Joomla website. No, make that mega-large: we’re talking about a website that gets 100,000 uniques and around 700,000 impressions every day (yes, that’s every day). The website in question is a news website that is ranked in the top 20 websites in […]

We are getting an increasing number of requests asking us to add the JavaScript code for the Google Tag Manager (which is another tracking tool mainly used by marketing departments). We have decided, in this post, to share a quick and simple guide on how to do this. First thing you will need is to […]

Joomla’s issues caused by caching are many, but one of these issues is extremely annoying and we are surprised how the Joomla development team hasn’t come up with a solid solution to it yet. In case you’re still wondering what the issue is, then it is no other than the conflict between hit counting and […]

Note: The solution presented in this post requires, ahem, a slight modification in a core file. Proceed with caution, and keep in mind that any change you make may be no more when you update your Joomla website. A couple of hours ago, a high level developer working for a major client of ours told […]

Note: The solution presented in this post involves a modification to a core Joomla file. Please proceed with caution and keep in mind that a core modification can be wiped out with a future Joomla update, potentially breaking your website (or, at best, breaking your website’s links). Every now and then, a client calls us […]

One of our very large clients had a weird problem on a newly migrated Joomla website: everything was working properly on the website, except for the fact that they couldn’t add any contact (in the Contacts component) because the “Save” button wasn’t there. In fact, the only button that they could see was the “Cancel” […]

Early last week, we had a case where a malicious extension was subtly installed on the Joomla website for one of our clients. Luckily, our extra security measures prevented actual harm, but still, we were confident that if the person who installed that extension was a bit more persistent, he could have wiped out the […]

Note: This post applies to Joomla 2.5 only. If you’re running Joomla 3.x and you can’t delete articles from Joomla’s trash, then please let us know in the comment section of this post as the below solution will not work for you. Yes – we know – our regular readers might say that we have […]

One of our newer clients called us yesterday morning and told us that his Joomla website was running very slow. So we checked his website and we immediately knew the cause of the problem, Mosets! If you are a regular reader of our blog, then you probably know that we don’t think highly of this […]

A client called us earlier this week and told us that when he logs in to his Joomla website and he checks which users are logged in to the website, he only sees the login date. Given that all his users login nearly every day, just seeing the date wasn’t enough for him. He also […]

A large company (that we have worked with before) emailed on us on Friday morning and told us that they were seeing a blank page on their homepage. When we visited the website we noticed that the page was almost blank. In fact, there was some content on the website. But the main component and […]

Yesterday, we had a new customer, from Denmark, with a very nice Joomla website, asking us to fix one of the most annoying Joomla problems. The problem was that whenever he tried to login from the backend, he was getting redirected back to the login page without any error. He was confident that the username […]

A new client of ours called us today and told us that he’s facing a major challenge after migrating his Joomla website from 1.5.26 to 3.4.1. He told us that the No Parent option seems to be missing from the Parent dropdown in Edit Category mode, which meant that whenever he tries to add a […]

We were commissioned yesterday to optimize a large Joomla website. That website was using FlexiContent as its content engine. In case you don’t know, FlexiContent extends Joomla’s core content management system, and does not replace it (unlike K2). The main reason why our client was using FlexiContent was that it supports multiple categories (per article). […]

This weekend we had a very interesting task. We were told, by one of our top clients, to display a list of all their Pages from HubSpot, along with a link to them. As usual, we obliged, and we were glad that they gave us this task, because it was something that we haven’t done […]

Lately, we spent a lot of time working on a project integrating ListHub, the famous MLS platform, on an existing Joomla website. The project consisted of finding “special” listings (those listings with special criteria) within ListHub‘s listings and then displaying them on the site. Despite the fact that it was our third project that consisted […]

We can never praise K2 enough – we think it handles content even better than Joomla (we did write a post about its advantages). It’s not perfect though, and it does, occasionally, suffer from some inconsistencies. For example, if you’re editing an item in K2, and you scroll down to the bottom of the editor, […]

Many Joomla administrators make the mistake by uploading all their images to the root directory of the images folder. A mistake, as they all soon discover, that can cause the media manager to crash. At itoctopus, we have come up with a solution to this problem, and we call it: EDIJ (short for Evenly Distributing […]

Before we begin, let us explain what swap is… Swap, in server terms, is hard disk space reserved by the system to be used as a backup memory in case the RAM is fully used. Once a server starts using swap memory, then you will notice some degradation in the performance because the RAM is […]

A new international client called us very early in the morning today and told us that he was seeing the following error when trying to access his website: “The requested URL index.php was not found on this server.” We immediately checked the problem and we noticed that the error was on every page – so […]

We’re not the biggest fans of Joomla’s Email Cloaking plugin; we think it’s useless. But, obviously, the Joomla development team doesn’t agree with us as the plugin still exists in Joomla 3.4.x (the latest version of Joomla at time of writing this post). Additionally, there are still many Joomla websites who still use this plugin […]