At itoctopus, we always provide solutions. But the solutions that we are really proud of are the simple solutions, the solutions that don’t involve a lot of work to implement, the solutions that are clear and that actually work! Today, we are proud to announce that we have created a Joomla 2.5 module that will […]

If you perform a search on your regular Joomla website, you will notice that the search results will only display a maximum of 50 matches, even though you might have more. So, why is that and how to fix it? To answer the “why” part of the question, Joomla is a heavy CMS, and, obviously, […]

We love K2 (we actually said that before) and we think that it’s a better content manager than Joomla’s own content manager. In fact, we are increasingly helping companies migrating the content of their Joomla websites from Joomla to K2. However, there are always little issues with K2, which is perfectly acceptable considering its huge […]

We have been securing/cleaning Joomla websites for so long that we have identified the three-step process a malicious attacker performs to hack a Joomla website: The attacker injects a PHP file in the images directory. The attacker then replicates the PHP script into other directories where it’s under the radar. This strategy ensures that the […]

Yesterday (yes – we work on Sundays!), we were moving a Joomla website hosted on a Plesk version 9 server to a Plesk version 11 server – the transfer was pretty smooth, except that when we tested the website on the new server, we got a blank page. Restarting Apache didn’t solve the problem (although […]

One of our clients called us today and told us that the captcha below JComments comments is not working properly. She said that it works on page load, but once she hits the refresh button below the captcha, the captcha image disappears. Hmmm! We did a long investigation and we finally discovered that the reason […]

A company that we deal with runs a very large Joomla website mainly discussing law topics. The company complained that Joomla’s search doesn’t address a very common human issue: spelling mistakes. For example, if you are trying to search for Lawyer and you searched for Lauyer, then you won’t find anything using Joomla’s search, this […]

A couple of days ago we were working a skeleton template that is used to display some articles in lightbox popups. The template was very straightforward and had a few lines of code and had only one module position. We created the xml manifest file and then we packaged the template into a zip file […]

About a week ago, one of our clients was seeing an Internal Server Error when he was trying to upload an image with a quote through the media manager. That was weird, we thought… So, we changed error reporting to maximum and we still saw the same, ambiguous, Internal Server Error – clearly something that […]

A consulting company that subcontracts work to us sent us a quick task late at night yesterday. Everytime they create a module on a particular website, the module’s content is encapsulated in the following div: <div class=”moduletable”>Module Content</div> The encapsulating div is causing problems in the layout and they want to remove it. Now, if […]

If you have been running a Joomla website for some time, you would have noticed the presence of a parameter called ItemId in your Joomla URLs. Curiously, the ItemId has nothing to do with the id of the article being displayed – so what is it and why is it there? The ItemId is the […]

If you have been working on Joomla websites for a long time now, you might have run into the situation where you needed to search for an article by ID instead of its title. This is an extremely easy task if you have access to phpMyAdmin (you just need to login to phpMyAdmin, and go […]

While optimizing a migrated Joomla website today, we noticed that one of the queries was taking an exceptionally long time. It was this one: SELECT a.id, CASE WHEN CHAR_LENGTH(a.alias) THEN CONCAT_WS(‘:’, a.id, a.alias) ELSE a.id END as slug, CASE WHEN CHAR_LENGTH(cc.alias) THEN CONCAT_WS(‘:’, cc.id, cc.alias) ELSE cc.id END as catslug FROM #__content AS a LEFT […]

If you’re reading this post, then this means that most likely you have reached a level, in Joomla, where you know that you can override the default layout of any view in any component by copying template files to the html directory of the template and then modifying these files. For example, if you want […]

When we develop custom Joomla components for our clients, a very common task that we do is that we call custom controller functions from a URL within a view. For example, just today, while working on a custom component that’ll allow people to post their press releases through the frontend of a Joomla website, we […]

Here’s a small Saturday niblet… While trying to uninstall a template from the Template Manager, we encountered the following error: Cannot delete last style of a template And, of course, we were not able to uninstall the template. Uninstalling the template was necessary for us because we wanted to re-install it as it had an […]

Warning: Implementing the fix in this post will reset all your ACL modifications. Additionally, it’ll remove all the associations between your users and your groups – with the exception of the user with the first ID in the #__users table. It’ll also remove all the groups that you have created. If you have a large […]

Note: This post is targeted at Joomla developers. We were seeing the following error while trying to save the data in a Joomla form that we have created in the admin: Save failed with the following error: (with the colon at the end) The above tells us that there is a problem with saving the […]

Note: This post expects the reader to be a Joomla developer. If you’re a casual Joomla user with no programming experience then most likely this post is not for you. Sometimes, you search the web for a solution to something in Joomla and all you find is: Outdated information Code that doesn’t work Code that […]

Joomla is great when it comes to facilitating things for developers. For example, if you want to create a form that saves and retrieves data from the database in the backend, all you need to do is to create the XML schema file and create some standard files (these files are merely copy and paste […]

Many of our clients are large companies that choose to host their websites in-house. They do this because of security and data confidentiality concerns. This is standard practice in large companies but it usually suffers from the following drawbacks: In most cases, the in-house data center infrastructure is not at par with standard hosting infrastructures. […]

Nearly a month ago, we discussed how to quickly move a Joomla website from development to production. The process that we described in that post always worked for us – until yesterday. Here’s what we did: We created a fresh Joomla instance under a sub-directory called v2. We migrated the old content and we ensured […]

We have explained a long time ago how to add an HTML Text Editor field to an extension in Joomla 2.5 – and we have stated that the method described in that post only works on Joomla 2.5. Back then, we thought that we’ll never have to do this on Joomla 1.5 – and we […]

At itoctopus, we pride ourselves that we often give real solutions to common problems when no one else does! This morning was no different. We have solved a common problem with sh404SEF that even the creators of that extension claimed that there is no solution for. Here’s the problem. Let’s say you choose to include […]

It seems that every single 3rd party company developing Joomla extensions has either created or is creating a responsive template and is marketing that template to its customer base as the next big thing. Even RSJoomla, a company that we really like and respect, is doing that… We have to say that we’re amazed at […]

While migrating a Joomla website from 1.5 to 2.5, we had an interesting issue: after we migrated the content and activated sh404SEF, we noticed that the IDs of the articles were at the beginning of the URL, instead of its end. For example, instead of this link: http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/test-article-12345.html We had this link: http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/12345-test-article.html Quick Note: […]

One of our very large customers gave us a call last Friday and told us that a stat counter that they were using on one of their websites suddenly stopped working. That stat counter was very important for them, since it was used by their potential advertisers to know how much page impressions they will […]

We have already expressed that we are not very big fans of sh404SEF – we think that this extension does more harm than good for what it does. But, the fact of the matter is, there are thousands of Joomla websites using it, so, whether we like it or not, it’s part of Joomla’s ecosystem […]

GoDaddy, although one of the largest hosting companies out there, has a not-so-good reputation when it comes to security. In fact, many of the Joomla websites that we fix are hosted on GoDaddy. So why is that? Well, we think that there are three major reasons why Joomla websites hosted on GoDaddy get hacked more […]

A new client called us this evening and told us that she’s seeing a blank page when saving a K2 item. She told us that the item was being saved correctly despite the blank page. Hmmm… A blank page, as you might have already guessed, is a sign of a fatal error somewhere. So what […]

At itoctopus, we like to give our readers a really special treat from time to time. Today (well, actually tonight – it’s 2:19 AM here in Montreal now), we have decided to release, for free, a plugin that is used to automatically post tweets whenever you publish a new K2 item. In other words, whenever […]

Every single time we migrate a large Joomla website to Joomla 2.5, we have to optimize it. Not because the client asks to do it and not because we think it’s fun (or because we like gold-plating), but because we have to – elsewise the website would be crawling. But why is that? Well, let’s […]

Note: Please read this post, in full, before taking any action. The representative of a large company that has contracted us to maintain its array of Joomla websites contacted us today and told us that some of the company’s users were not able to login to the backend of one specific website. Since we were […]

A client emailed us this morning and told us that after his website was migrated to Joomla 2.5, he was seeing the below error whenever he tried to download an attachment in Mosets Tree: You are not authorized to access this attachment. So, we started debugging Mosets Tree in order to trace the source of […]

The main administrator of a very large Joomla website called us today and told us that they have the following problem: a few articles, while being listed under the right directory, have the wrong category selected (in the menu) when they are viewed individually. For example, Article A belongs to Category C, and when you […]

If you have tried to search for a very long sentence in Joomla, then most likely the only result that you got was the following: Search term must be a minimum of 3 characters and a maximum of 20 characters. If you really want people to search for long sentences on your website, then obviously […]

A client of us called us today and told us that her website was hacked – again! She reminded us politely that we have cleaned her old Joomla website nearly a week ago but her website got hacked again, even though she did migrate to Joomla 2.5 as we recommended her to do. That’s odd! […]

Note: This post assumes your server is powered by WHM/cPanel and that you have ssh access. If you’re using Plesk then you can still do the below with minor modifications. As usual, you can contact us for help. Warning: While we try our best to make our guides as easy as possible, we have to […]

We just had an interesting conversation over the phone with a Joomla website administrator. The conversation went like this: – “Hi. My name is [customer name] and I work at [company name] and I’m calling you because I heard that you are experts in Joomla security.” – “That is true”, we said, “How can we […]

Note: This post is extremely advanced. If you’re not a technical person then we suggest you email it to your developer so that he can implement the suggestions below. If you don’t have a developer you can call us and we’ll take care of the optimization of your Joomla website. We had a small debate […]

We love K2 – it’s one of those rare components that are a true a gem. Nevertheless, we do discover some quirks in the K2 engine from time to time. Today, we have discovered a problem with setting the Open Graph description meta tag. Here’s what happened this afternoon… In the HTML code of one […]

One of our clients asked us to install RokQuickCart on his Joomla website. For those of you who don’t know, RokQuickCart is a free Joomla component that is used for small stores with standard items (e.g. online stores selling books, subscriptions, etc…) The nice thing about this component is that it’s extremely easy to use […]

One of our customers complained to us today that his Joomla website was extremely slow. So, we used the MySQL slow query log to unveil the issue, and we discovered that the culprit was Mosets Tree. In particular, it was these two queries: SELECT l.*, c.cat_name, c.cat_id, u.username AS username, u.name AS owner, u.email AS […]

We got a call from a client this afternoon telling us that when logging in to his website, he was redirected to another login. He was seeing this error: Use a valid username and password to gain access to the administrator backend. We thought he was experiencing one of the many common login issues on […]

AllVideos is an excellent plugin that uses the JW player to display videos in different formats. It’s excellent and it usually works without a hitch. However, if you have been using it for a long time in different environments, you might have seen the following error: The video could not be loaded, either because the […]

Note: This post is extremely advanced and is aimed at Joomla administrators with a solid technical background. We love Joomla. We think that it’s one of the best CMS’s out there, if not the best CMS. That’s why we think it’s good to constructively criticize it from time to time so that it remains where […]

One of the really annoying plugins that we have to constantly work with is the MultiThumb plugin (or the so-called BK-MultiThumb plugin). It is annoying because we always have to modify the core to make it work the way we want it to work. It is also poorly documented and is characterized by an erratic […]

A couple of hours ago, we got an urgent call from a client in the UK (it’s now 7:30 AM here in Montreal), the client was using JEvents (the well known Joomla event calendar extension) to display the events of his company. He told us that for some reason, all the events under some categories […]

A client emailed us late at night yesterday and told us that all of the pages on his Joomla website have a weird hash in the URL. He told us that he just noticed the problem and he needed it fixed immediately. So, we checked the website and it was something we haven’t seen before: […]

A well known client of us came to us yesterday evening and told us that he was getting a blank page when he saves the user’s data on a custom made component. We knew there was a fatal error somewhere so we set the “Error Reporting” to “Maximum” and we tried to save the profile, […]