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 more to this: Joomla allows the administrator to have a different order for featured articles, and that order is independent from their order within their respective categories.
If you’re the skeptical type, then you are probably thinking: “Well, OK! But that’s not really much!” And it isn’t, except that the underlying database structure and the code gets signficantly messy because of this. You see, in order to support the above functionality, Joomla queries an additional table on a page with a Featured Articles menu item (which, again, is typically the homepage), which creates a huge load on the server when that table is of considerable size. The solution to this problem is to regularly trim the #__content_frontpage table and ensure that it doesn’t contain more than 100 entries. This can be done the following way (please backup your database before proceeding further; if you don’t want to then at least backup the #__content_frontpage table):
- Login to phpMyAdmin.
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Click on the #__content_frontpage table on the left pane (of course, you will need to replace #__ with the database alias of your Joomla website).
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Click on the SQL tab on the top and type in the following query:
DELETE FROM `#__content_frontpage` WHERE `ordering` > 100; -
Click on the Go button on the bottom right.
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That’s it!
Once you do the above, you will feel a noticeable gain particularly if your #__content_frontpage table is quite large.
We hope that you found this post useful. If you need help with the implementation, or if you need to implement the above in a cron, then please contact us. We are always happy to serve, our prices are super affordable, and our work is super clean.