One of our clients called us today and told us that they were trying to save an Event in the DPCalendar extension, and they were getting an Internal Server Error. They said that the same problem was happening when they were trying to save a blog in EasyBlog. From our experience, the majority of Internal […]
A huge racing website that we manage sends out daily newsletters using AcyMailing (the famous newsletter extension for Joomla), and every time those newsletters are sent, the website slows down gradually and eventually crawls to a halt. The whole performance degradation time is typically only a few minutes, which has always been tolerable by the […]
A client called us back on Friday and told us that his company was having some serious load issues on its high traffic corporate website (which was, or course, using a Joomla website). Usually, when there are performance issues on a website, the first thing that we check is the slow query log (typically located […]
We are getting an increasing number of clients telling us that they want to display certain modules only for mobile devices (and some other modules only for computers). This is very normal, since all websites are seeing a dramatic increase in mobile traffic, a fact that is causing businesses to target mobile visitors with some […]
One of our regular clients was seeing the following error when trying to view the VirtueMart orders in the backend of his Joomla 3.3.6 website: Error displaying the error page: Could not connect to MySQL.: MySQL server has gone away SQL=SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS o.*, CONCAT_WS(‘ ‘,u.first_name,u.middle_name,u.last_name) AS order_name ,u.email as order_email,pm.payment_name AS payment_method FROM #__virtuemart_orders as […]
One of the extremely convenient (and very cool) features in RSForm Pro is the Calculations feature. The Calculations feature can be found by logging to the backend of the Joomla website, and then by going to RS Form Pro -> Manage Forms, and then clicking on the form you wish to add the calculations to, […]
One of our clients was getting the following error after upgrading Joomla from 3.3.6 to 3.4: Fatal error: Call to undefined method stdClass::render() in /components/com_jcomments/libraries/joomlatune/template.php on line 318 He told us that immediately after he upgraded to Joomla 3.4, JComments (the famous Joomla commenting platform), stopped working (clicking on the Add Comments link stopped working). […]
If you have already optimized many of the slow queries on your Joomla website using the power of the MySQL slow query log, and yet MySQL is still putting some pressure on your server load, then a good idea would be to check which indexless queries are being executed by your database server. By indexless […]
Note: The solution in this post is compatible with all versions of Joomla that are 2.5 and above (as of March 2015). Another note: This solution will always work on compatible Joomla versions. Warning: The solution in this post is a core modification – this means that your changes will be possibly wiped out with […]
A couple of days ago a client called us and told us that whenever someone tries to click on a link in an ACYMailing newsletter, he was seeing a blank page. The client assured us that he didn’t change anything in the code. If you have been reading our blog for a while, then you […]
A new client emailed us yesterday and told us that every time he tries to login to the backend of his Joomla website, he’s redirected to the login page with no errors (our client called this issue “the admin login loop”). So the first thing that we asked him is whether he checked our post […]
A new client called us and told us that a newly created menu of his, which is created out of another menu, does not work. He said that none of the links work in the new menu, despite the fact that they work in the other menu. So we looked into the issue and we […]
404: it’s probably the most known number in the Internet world, and it means that the page is not found. Ironically, 200, the response code that one will get when the page is found and everything’s OK, is not nearly as known. This, from our psychological perspective, sheds a light on the pessimistic nature of […]
A client called us around 1:30 AM this morning, and told us that his website went down all of a sudden. We checked the website and here’s the error that we saw: No Input File Specified Hmmm… It was probably the first time that we saw this error and so we started by debugging the […]
In this day and age, everyone wants more content on their website (after all, content is king), so for many, this post won’t make any sense. But for some, it does. In fact, we had some clients who actually wanted to reset the content of their Joomla website, despite the potential SEO implications (which we […]
Blank pages on Joomla sites: we thought we have seen them all. But today, we discovered that there might still be a few reasons that we don’t know of that cause blank pages on Joomla sites. Here’s what happened… A new client called us this morning and told us that he was seeing a blank […]
Warning: This is an extremely advanced post that requires some serious system administration skills and some serious programming skills. If you feel you’re not up to it, then don’t do it! Ask some Joomla experts (such as, ahem, us!) to do the implementation for you – you’ll save time and your blood pressure will not […]
A new client called us this morning and told us that whenever someone tries registering on his website, he gets the following error: Could not start mail function The client was frustrated because he contacted two firms before contacting us, and both of these firms weren’t successful in resolving the problem. So, the first thing […]
An international news agency using Joomla to power one of their websites called us yesterday. They told us that they’re seeing a blank page, and the problem turned out to be related to sh404SEF’s cache (the cache file was exhausting all the memory that the system has and throwing this error). Due to the nature […]
One of our very large clients sent us an email stating that the doctors working at an extremely high profile hospital were unable to access their website (our client’s Joomla website). The email stated that the website was timing out for them. At first, we thought it was a browser issue (since large companies tend […]
One of Joomla’s biggest misconceptions is that if someone wants to make an article private (e.g. only allow access to that article for registered users), then all that needs to be done is to point a menu item to that article and change the Access value of that menu item to Registered and that’s it! […]
Note: This is an extremely advanced post that requires some serious knowledge with Joomla as well as more than average programming skills. If you feel that it’s a bit over your head then you should ask some Joomla experts to do it for you (like, ahem, us) since caching is a very delicate feature in […]
Note: This post is aimed at Joomla beginners – make that absolute Joomla beginners! We’ve been writing posts for extremely advanced Joomla developers for a long time now and we thought writing a post for absolute beginners would be the right thing to do on New Year’s Eve (Happy New Year, by the way)! We […]
A new client of ours has been using Joomla for a long time (since Joomla 1.5 was introduced), but has never, ever used Apache’s URL Rewriting. She has been using Joomla’s SEF all the time, but she never enabled the Use URL Rewriting feature. She knew that enabling URL rewriting can boost the search engine […]
Joomla 1.5, probably the most used Joomla version ever, officially died back in 2012. Back then, many Joomla administrators were faced with a dilemma: Should we migrate our Joomla website(s) to 2.5? Or should we switch to another CMS? The decision was not easy, because in many cases, the costs of migrating to Joomla 2.5 […]
We’re not big fans of the #__assets table, but you probably know this already if you’re one of our loyal readers! The #__assets table makes everything on the website slower, and not to mention that minor data integrity issues on that table can lead to large problems on the Joomla website. But let’s focus in […]
Here’s how the majority of malicious users try to hack your beloved Joomla website: They search for an exploit on your Joomla website. They use that exploit to upload a PHP file to your website. They invoke the URL pointing to that file, and by doing so, they create duplicates of the malicious file, hack […]
Note: The second solution presented in this post is a core change. Keep in mind that if you change the core of your Joomla website, you may need to re-apply your changes after a Joomla update. Also keep in mind that this particular core change may compromise the stability of your website (especially if your […]
“Joomla’s caching will come back to haunt you.” – itoctopus, Joomla experts, circa 2014 Note: The solution to this problem requires a modification to a core file, which means that future Joomla updates will wipe out the solution. Be careful and vigilant when you update your website if you have modified core files. One of […]
Note: The below is a rant – we just wanted to let you know beforehand in case you’re not in the mood for a rant on a Friday afternoon. One of the things that we do when optimizing a large Joomla website is tweaking MySQL’s settings in the my.cnf configuration file (this file is typically […]
Note: Please read the whole post before taking any action. There is some important information at the end. If you check your Joomla site’s MySQL slow query log occasionally, you will notice that it is full of queries there are related to the #__session table (INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs). This is because Joomla updates the #__session […]
For the past month (yes, month!) we have been working on the security of a major website that suffered from a substantial hack. We were able to mostly secure the website, but still, there was a leak somewhere and we didn’t know where. The “leak” consisted of a malicious file called client.php that was created […]
Note: We probably should have called this post “You Do Not Have Access to the Administrator Section of This Site” Error When Trying to Login to Joomla’s Frontend, but we went with the current title because we thought it was shorter, catchier, and much more original… The #__assets table in a Joomla database is not […]
Joomla 3.5 is supposed to be released on November 15th, in exactly ten days from now, but we all know that this won’t happen, because Joomla 3.4 was supposed to be released on September 15th, and, even almost 2 months later, it’s still in the Joomla oven. But that’s not the real problem, the real […]
A major company called us early last week and told us that they were alerted that they have the Sweet Orange Exploit Kit on their Joomla website. They said that a tool that they’re using to block malware sites, called ProofPoint, has blocked their own website because it contains malware! The report generated by ProofPoint […]
If you’re not using a 3rd party extension to generate your SEF links, then most likely you are already annoyed by the presence of the article ID in article URLs. In fact, most Joomla administrators use a 3rd party SEF extension to generate their links instead of Joomla’s built-in SEF tool because of this particular […]
A major website that we manage used sh404SEF heavily for SEF links. Although we don’t think highly of sh404SEF, we were hesitant to remove it (despite its many issues) because the website was highly dependent on it. However, we were courageous enough to make the brave decision (OK, now we’re flattering ourselves) to dump sh404SEF […]
If you’re using the “Email this link to a friend” feature in Joomla, then you might have probably noticed that the popup window that opens when clicking on the link has fixed width and height, which means that if you ever decide to change its template, then it’s very possible that those fixed width and […]
A major healtchare client of ours emailed us yesterday and told us that they’re getting reports from some visitors that their Joomla website (the healthcare website) is blocked because it is compromised. One of those reports stated that it was Websense that labeled the website as compromised. So, we immediately went to csi.websense.com and we […]
One of the most annoying, and needless plugins on Joomla is the email cloaking content plugin. For those of you who don’t know what this plugin is, it translates any email (a string that matches an email pattern) to JavaScript obfuscated code in order to prevent spammers from picking up that email and ultimately spamming […]
One of our clients called us today and told us that his Joomla website was slow to load. We checked the website immediately, and not only it was slow, it was extremely slow. It was taking about 20 seconds to load. We went through the following checklist: Was the website hacked?: It wasn’t. In fact, […]
We have probably mentioned this before – RSForm is one of the few Joomla extensions that we love and that we trust, and we get really excited when a client gives us a task on this powerful extension. Yesterday (Sunday), one of our clients contacted us and told us that she wanted those who fill […]
For the past week or so, we have been working on a very puzzling issue. A client’s website was hacked. In fact, there was only one file that was hacked. The mootools-core.js file which is located under the /media/system/js folder. The hack was not detected by any scan – commercial or not – internal or […]
One of the most common questions we get on the phone (we always answer the phone) is the following: “Sorry, but where I can change content xyz on My Joomla website? Our invariable answer to this question is always: “Have you checked your modules?” And we typically get the following answer: “Ah! Let me check…”, […]
If you’re trying to migrate a Joomla website to the latest version, then it’s very possible for you to see the following notice: Use of undefined constant DS – assumed ‘DS’ in … The above notice stems from the fact that Joomla no longer makes a differentiation between Linux and Windows when it comes to […]
One of our clients emailed us yesterday afternoon and told us that after making a small change on his YouGrids Joomla template, he was seeing the following warnings (several times): Warning: explode() expects parameter 2 to be string, array given in /templates/yougrids/yjsgcore/lib/yjsg_loadgrids.php on line 247 Warning: array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given […]
Note: The menu item solution in this post requires a small modification to a core Joomla file. Unfortunately, there is no way around this. If you’re not comfortable doing this, then please contact us and we’ll do it for you. We can also create an extension that allows you to do the below without modifying […]
We had a call from one of our clients yesterday – she told us that her hosting company shut down her website because it was hacked and told her that they can’t reactivate the website unless the website is cleaned up or unless she subscribes to a security plan that costs $99/month. Our client ran […]
We are firm believers that Joomla must be a very light product. We think that all useless extensions should be removed from Joomla. Yes, you heard that right, there are few extensions in Joomla that are useless and must be removed, and they are: Banners: If there is one extension that has been consistently used […]
A new client called us yesterday evening and told us that he was seeing the following error on some pages of his Joomla website: 0 – SQL= The error was in the traditional red layout, immediately followed by the classic “You may not be able to visit this page because of…” message. The page where […]