If you’re into Joomla plugin development, then you are most likely familiar with the onContentBeforeSave and the onContentAfterSave events. The first event is triggered just before someone saves any Joomla content item, and the second event is triggered (you’ve guessed it) just after someone saves a Joomla content item. The onContentBeforeSave event is typically used […]
We love optimization work, there’s always something new to discover, and there’s always something new to learn. Our love for optimization led us to discover a gem, a little optimization gem that literally halved the load of a server powering an extremely large and high traffic Joomla website. As usual, we are always thrilled to […]
A client of ours wanted to integrate webinar purchasing on her Joomla website. She had a GetResponse account where she creates webinars, and she wanted to give her clients the ability to purchase her GetResponse webinars through her website. Unfortunately, GetResponse does not technically allow either directly or indirectly the purchase of webinars. So, in […]
A regular client of ours came to us yesterday evening with an interesting task: she wanted to set the Last-Modified HTTP header on an article page to the actual modified date of an article. We thought it was an easy task, until we started working on it. You see, by default, Joomla sets the Last-Modified […]
Note: The solution in this post is a modification to a core file. Proceed at your own risk, and keep in mind that a Joomla update may wipe out your changes. We got a request from a client of ours to display articles from multiple categories on an existing category blog page. As a Joomla […]
Note: The second solution presented in this post consists of a core modification, which means that a future update can overwrite your changes. Always document your core modifications so that you can re-apply them after an update. During the past weekend, we updated the website of one of our clients to Joomla 3.7.5 from Joomla […]
Unlike WordPress, Joomla has the unique ability that allows an administrator to label an article as a featured article, which means that the article will display on a page where the menu item is of type Featured Articles (typically, this page is the homepage). You might think, well, that’s not so special, but there is […]
One of the nice features in Joomla is that you can update the CMS from either the backend or from the filesystem. We typically update our clients’ websites from the backend, but, when we encounter the minor of issues, we update it using the filesystem. Here’s how: We ssh to the server as root and […]
One of the common bottlenecks on any website, and not just a Joomla website, is large database tables. Large tables, especially those with significant and constant CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) activities, can cause serious load issues on websites. This means that it’s always a good idea to check your Joomla websites for large […]
A new client emailed us back on Saturday (today is Monday), and told us that he was seeing the famous (and dreaded) Invalid Token error whenever he tried to login to his Joomla website. He told us that the whole thing happened all of a sudden. He assured us that he didn’t install a new […]
Every few months, we get a request to execute a Joomla administrator view from a cron job. For example, a recent request consisted of running an administrator view from a cron job in order to grab data from other sites and save them into the Joomla website. Now, if you have dealt with cron jobs […]
A new client called us this morning and told us that the was seeing the following error on his website when he was visiting it: An error has occurred. 500 JHtmlBehavior::polyfill not found So, we visited his website in order to check what is going on, and, to our surprise, we didn’t see the error. […]
We are getting calls from Joomla administrators telling us that they are seeing a bizarre warning in the backend of their Joomla sites after updating their sites to 3.7.x. Here is a sample warning: Your PHP version, 5.6.30, is only receiving security fixes at this time from the PHP project. This means your PHP version […]
RSForm Pro is one of the most powerful extensions out there. You can create any type of form with it, and associate any action you can think of when the form is submitted, whether through plugins or through embedded PHP code. This makes RSForm ideal for integrating Joomla with payment gateways (such as Authorize, PayPal, […]
A client with a huge Arabic news website called us on April 26th (the day Joomla 3.7 was released) and told us that he’s not able to save articles after updating to Joomla 3.7. He told us that article saving was timing out, and urged us to take a look. As usual, we obliged. We […]
Joomla 3.7 is a weird iteration of the famous CMS – it seems that quite a few important things were half baked or not completely tested. For example, the new routing functionality that was meant to be completely revamped in Joomla 3.7 was supposedly scratched from that version, to be later introduced in a future […]
A common issue on Joomla websites with frontend editing is that the behavior of the “Save” button on the frontend is different from the behavior of the “Save” button in the backend. The “Save” button in the backend saves the item and redirects back to the item’s page while the “Save” button on the frontend […]
Let’s do a simple experiment together. Go to your Joomla website, type in something like: http://www.[yourjoomlawebsite].com/test.jpg (assuming you do not have a test.jpg file in the root directory of your Joomla website). You will notice that Joomla displays a 404 error. What’s wrong with that, you may be wondering? Well, what is wrong is that […]
Each day, more and more clients are calling us to address the slow article saving problem that they are experiencing on their Joomla websites. We’re not 100% sure why this is becoming an increasingly common Joomla problem, but we think that it might be that more large sites are using Joomla (though we have no […]
Note: The solution presented in this post is a core change. Proceed carefully and always backup your website before modifying core files. A few days ago, we received an email from someone managing a very large Joomla website (it was a Brazilian news website). She said that the saving of articles was taking an abnormal […]
Back in 2013, we have debunked the myth that switching from HTTP to HTTPS will make a Joomla website more secure, and we have explicitly recommended against using it globally. Obviously, times are different now, and while we still haven’t changed our mind that such as switch will not make a Joomla website more secure, […]
A client called us this morning and told us that he was unable to create new modules and save existing modules. So, we logged in to his website and checked the problem, and it was like he said: we opened a module, we modified it, and then we saved it, but it wasn’t saving the […]
Back in 2011 (yes – that’s 6 years ago!) we published an article titled: “My Joomla Changes Are Not Showing!“. In short, the article stated that when Joomla changes in the backend are not visible on the frontend, then it’s a caching issue. Of course, Joomla has changed substantially between then and now, but typically, […]
One of the most annoying problems on Joomla websites is that saving articles can timeout (and display a 500 – Internal Server Error message) or can take an insane amount of time. This problem is not uncommon on large websites, and it typically gets worse every day. But why does this problem exist on a […]
Back in 2014, we presented a solution to a common Joomla problem then, where Joomla displays the mobile version of the template on the desktop (or vice versa). We stated that the problem was caused by the Joomla cache, which caches the mobile version of a page and displays it for both desktop and mobile […]
Ever since the elevated permissions (or elevated privileges) exploit in Joomla versions less than 3.6.5 was made public, we are seeing weird things happening to the #__users table on hacked Joomla websites. These weird things can be any (or all) of the following: The usernames of all the users are changed to admin. All super […]
A new client emailed us this morning and told us that the titles of modules assigned to a certain position are not showing. He told us he was using the latest version of Joomla, and that he ensured that “Show Title” was set to “Show” in the module’s settings. He told us that he’s confident […]
A client of us told us that he didn’t like the default CAPTCHA (by the way, in case you really want to know, CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) field that comes with RSForm. He said that the letters looked very small, and that it affected his […]
While processing what seemed to be a very simple request from one of our clients this morning, we encountered a very weird issue. The simple request was that the client wanted a simple registration form on his website, and the weird issue was that, for an unknown reason, we were redirected to the login form […]
We had a weird case late last week: a new client contacted us and told us that all the links on his website were pointing to the homepage. He told us that he was using NGINX, and he told us that he thought that NGINX is the cause of the issue. So, we checked the […]
We know, it’s been a couple of weeks since we last wrote a post on this blog – we’re not getting lazy, it’s just that we had quite a few large projects in December. Still, we feel guilty, and so we decided to write a post right now, and if you want to know what […]
Note: Any reference to ‘#__’ in this post must be replaced with the database alias of your website, which is defined in the configuration.php file. This noon, a client called us and told us that whenever he was trying to login to his Joomla website, he was seeing an empty page. He was quick to […]
There is a confusing “feature” in Joomla, and it is that the CMS, unintentionally, can have multiple links pointing to the same article. For example, if you go to the following URLs http://www.[your-joomla-website]/category-1/12-test-article.html and http://www.[your-joomla-website]/category-2/12-test-article.html then both URLs will work despite the fact that they point to the same article, and despite the fact that […]
Note: This post is extremely advanced. Only try to implement the below if you’re a solid developer and after backing up the Joomla website (database + filesystem). We had a weird case this morning. A client called us and told us that her staff were able to edit certain articles only once every day – […]
Note: You must replace #__ in the post below with your database alias which is the value of the variable $dbprefix that is defined in the configuration.php file of your Joomla website. Another note: Always backup your Joomla database before making any modifications to it. A not so uncommon fatal error on Joomla websites is […]
At itoctopus, we love doing things in different ways, this helps us broaden our horizon and it also allows us to provide several alternative solutions for our readers, who may prefer one method over another. In a previous post, we have discussed, in details, 2 methods for hiding the Joomla version. The first one consisted […]
Yesterday noon, a new client contacted us and told us that he was having problem when using HTTPS on his Joomla website (the website in question was using the latest Joomla version, which is 3.6.4). He said many images did not appear, and it seemed as if no CSS was applied to the website whatsoever. […]
While trying to update the Joomla website of a regular client of ours, we were faced with the following error: “The most recent request was denied because it contained an invalid security token. Please refresh the page and try again.” If you are an avid reader of our blog, then you will know that the […]
We think very highly of JCE and we have huge respect for its developers. We recommend it to our clients and we always install it on the Joomla websites that we fully manage. With the exception of very few quirks, our experience (and that of our clients) is very smooth with JCE. The very few […]
Note: This is an advanced post which mentions an unstable extension at the time of writing (November 2016). We suggest you avoid overriding the Joomla core if you’re not comfortable with your programming skills. If you need help with overriding the Joomla core, then you can always contact us! Until very recently, we used to […]
Sometimes, large companies have some text that they want to display somewhere on the backend of their website for their staff. The text might consist of editing instructions, a legal disclaimer, or a general announcement. Now, on the frontend, it is very easy to display such a text by using a Custom HTML module (nowadays, […]
A client of ours emailed us yesterday and told us that clients weren’t able to checkout on his VirtueMart store. He told us that they were seeing the following error: Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to www.eprocessingnetwork.Com:443 We did a quick research on the issue and it looked like it was caused by an […]
This morning, we thought we had a little time to do something fun, and so we created a command to generate a list of all user agent strings (or signatures) on a very high traffic Joomla website that we maintain. “Why is that?”, we hear you ask… Well, because 1) we were curious about which […]
Let’s say you want, for one reason or another (hopefully a good reason), to know the version of a Joomla website that you don’t own. You don’t have FTP/sFTP access to the site’s filesystem, you don’t have access to the backend, and you don’t know the owner. So, what do you do? Well, for the […]
We just got a call from a new client, telling us that she was perplexed about the fact that the number of banner impressions on her Joomla website is unrealistic. She said that her Joomla website is getting about 10K visitors/month according to Google Analytics, but the number of impressions counted on her Joomla website […]
Some time ago, while performing daily maintenance work for one of our large clients, we noticed that some of the external links that they had had some weird hash in them. What was interesting is that all these external links that had this problem were domains owned by the client. A little digging into the […]
Login loops are probably the most complex problems to fix on a Joomla website. Here’s the scenario: you go to the login page of the backend of your Joomla website, you enter your username and password, you click on the blue Log In button, but, to your surprise, you are redirected back to the login […]
A Joomla designer called us this morning and told us that he was seeing the following error when trying to load the Joomla website of his client: 500 – Unable to load renderer class He told us that this whole thing happened after switching to a new template, and that reverting back to the old […]
Last Monday, we received an email from a company (which is a client of ours) stating that any email sent from their Joomla website to an email to their domain isn’t being received. For example, assuming that their Joomla website is ourclientjoomlawebsite.com, and the Joomla website tries to send an email to admin@ourclientjoomlawebsite.com (the email, […]
A new client, with a Joomla 3.6.0 website, called us yesterday evening and told us that every time he tries to update his Joomla website, he sees the following the following error: Ajax Loading Error: Category not found So, we went to his website, and tried to update Joomla, but, as expected, we saw the […]