Yesterday we had a client that told us that he was unable to login to his Joomla website. He told us that everytime he tries to login, he gets redirected back to the login page with no error! Since he was a technical person, he told us that he did a research on the subject and the thinks that it’s the session.savepath Joomla problem. This made sense because Joomla uses the built-in PHP $_SESSION superglobal variable to maintain information about the logged in person and if it can’t save that information to the session, then it won’t be able to login the person.
So, the first thing we tried to do was to check whether sessions were actually working on the site, and they were (we set a session variable in one page and we retrieved in another page) – so that takes care of our client’s theory of why the problem is happening.
Our second attempt was to check the ACL (Access Control List) of the website as this problem is often associated with incorrect ACL. So we logged in to phpMyAdmin, we selected the database of his Joomla website, and we checked it and it was all clean: the tables jos_users, jos_usergroups, jos_user_usergroup_map, and jos_viewlevels were all OK. We then checked the specific entries in the table jos_assets that might affect the login process, and all these entries were fine.
We then tried to do things a bit differently, since our customer was a technical person, he made a backup for the website (the backup consisted of the filesystem and the database) before the problem happened and immediately after the problem happened. So, what we did was that we extracted the database from both backups and started comparing the database of the working website with that of the non-working website. There were about 20 differences – all of them were trivial, with the exception of a very small difference in one of the INSERT lines (the difference is in red):
INSERT line in the working version:
INSERT INTO `jos25_extensions` (`extension_id`, `name`, `type`, `element`, `folder`, `client_id`, `enabled`, `access`, `protected`, `manifest_cache`, `params`, `custom_data`, `system_data`, `checked_out`, `checked_out_time`, `ordering`, `state`) VALUES
(432, 'plg_user_joomla', 'plugin', 'joomla', 'user', 0, 1, 1, 0, '{"legacy":false,"name":"plg_user_joomla","type":"plugin","creationDate":"December 2006","author":"Joomla! Project","copyright":"(C) 2005 - 2009 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.","authorEmail":"admin@joomla.org","authorUrl":"www.joomla.org","version":"2.5.0","description":"PLG_USER_JOOMLA_XML_DESCRIPTION","group":""}', '{"autoregister":"1"}', '', '', 0, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', 2, 0);
INSERT line in the non-working version:
INSERT INTO `jos25_extensions` (`extension_id`, `name`, `type`, `element`, `folder`, `client_id`, `enabled`, `access`, `protected`, `manifest_cache`, `params`, `custom_data`, `system_data`, `checked_out`, `checked_out_time`, `ordering`, `state`) VALUES
(432, 'plg_user_joomla', 'plugin', 'joomla', 'user', 0, 0, 1, 0, '{"legacy":false,"name":"plg_user_joomla","type":"plugin","creationDate":"December 2006","author":"Joomla! Project","copyright":"(C) 2005 - 2009 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.","authorEmail":"admin@joomla.org","authorUrl":"www.joomla.org","version":"2.5.0","description":"PLG_USER_JOOMLA_XML_DESCRIPTION","group":""}', '{"autoregister":"1"}', '', '', 0, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', 2, 0);
As you can see, there is a “1” in the first line that is a “0” in the first line, and guess what – that was the cause of the whole problem. You see, that little 1 was telling Joomla that the user plugin was enabled and that all user activity should work normally. The 0 in the non-working version was telling Joomla to disable the user plugin, and that’s why logins where not working on the Joomla site and no errors were returned. Changing that value back to 1 fixed the whole problem.
So why did that happen?
We think that there are two reasons of why that happened:
- Someone manually disabled the user plugin on the Joomla website.
-
A (badly written) extension mistakenly disabled the userplugin. Our preliminary investigation on this issue leads to believe that this extension might be the userport extension.
If you have the problem where you’re trying to login to your Joomla backend and you’re getting redirected to the login screen, and if this post did not help you (or if it’s a bit too technical for you) then all you need to do is to contact us. We will respond immediately, we will fix your website as soon as we can, and we won’t charge you much!
I found it. Using myPHPadmin, I searched for ‘plg_user_joomla’, and found it in jos_extensions table. Made the change, saved it and all is well. Thanks for writing this article!
[…] to login to the backend of his Joomla website. While we’ve seen his exact problem before (he wasn’t able to login and no error was displayed), we were not able to fix it using our standard techniques. So we spent literally over 10 hours […]
This helped me also with resolving an issue with a Virtuemart login issue. Same thing happened, no message was displayed upon entering incorrect user login.
Worked for me!
I found it. Using myPHPadmin, I searched for ‘plg_user_joomla’, and found it in jos_extensions table. Made the change, saved it and all is well. Thanks for writing this article!
[…] – this post is Part II because we have discussed the same exact issue before – however, the cause of the issue was different then. In fact, we knew there must be other […]
For me the plugin was enabled but I couldn’t login, the field that was different was the access, my value was 2, I changed it to 1 and I can login again!
A very big Thank You! It works for me too! My value was 2 as Lina’s, I changed it to 1 and I can login again!
Hey there, thank you so much, that brought me on the right track: it was com_users: access=>0; changed it to 1; working again!
All the best,
Flo from Vienna
Thank you!
You fix has saved me hours of heartache trying to rebuild my web site. I guess it was a badly written plugin, but suddenly I couldn’t log into my Admin page at all.
I followed your instructions and updated the database and everything is working perfectly now.
Thank you very much for taking the time to publish your findings in such a clear and easy to follow format.
Cheers, K.
I took a lot of different approaches to resolve this, and ultimately it was .htaccess causing the issue. I didn’t know why it was causing that, but if you need a bandaid, remove that .htaccess.
Hi Sir. Thanks for your nice help.
I tried to take back the access to my Joomla 2.5.28 following your suggestions, but it didn’t work.
I also tried to change the .htaccess doc, but it didn’t work either.
Could you please help me?
Up to yesterday morning everything was working perfectly, but than we lost the login to the system.
As described, when we type the password, the system take back to the same page, with no messages at all. We also tried with the last backup we had (taken last Friday), and we tried to use it online, as well as on a local server with XAMPP – but that didn’t help (we still had the same problem)!
We have installed Community Builder, with CBSubscription module. We are using PHP 5.4 because the release of CBSubscription we are using does not support newer versions on PHP.
Thanks indeed
Alessandro
Hi Alessandro,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. There are many other reasons why this exact problem might happen. In fact, we have published an article about a variation of this problem here. In short, the problem described by the other post was caused by an error in the configuration file, where Joomla was using memcache to store sessions instead of storing them in the database (memcache was probably not even installed on the server).
Hi,
Thank you so much for this! I lost hours, checked about every thing I could through phpMyAdmin. I even went and compared an old back up of database that I had with the new one…
In a break I did a Google research and found this! Thank you so much!
In my case the problem was with the public $cookie_domain = ”; directive in the configuration file. I forgot to change the value for that directive after moving the site to a different domain.
Hi,
In my case the problem was the “plg_authentication_joomla”. This plugin was somehow disabled. Setting enabled=1 fixed the issue!
Thanks.
Arthur
Hi,
In my case, the front end login for php version 7.x doesn’t work, and it also doesn’t show an error.
It works just fine with PHP 5.6
The funniest thing is that the same website on the other server with php 7 and works just fine.
Thanks guys
I just had the same issue with my own website. I disabled some plugins yesterday and was still able to work on the website afterwards. When I tried to log in today it didn’t work and by some lucky chance I found this article. I enabled the plugin manually in the database and voila.
You saved me a ton of worries.
Hi Simon,
I can think of 2 things:
– Some weird caching at the .htaccess level
– A plugin causing this mess.
If the above doesn’t help, then a good idea would be to check the Apache logs to see how the requests are being received, and which responses are being sent…
How did this happen? Luckily the solution worked for me!
Using phpMyAdmin I went to ‘plg_user_joomla’ (in jos_extensions table), set enabled to “1” saved it and it worked.
Thanks for writing this article!