My Joomla Changes Are Not Showing!

If you’re reading this post then probably the following has happened (or is currently happening) to you:

– You disable a module (or change a template, or disable/enable/update any extension).
– You go to your website and check if the module is no longer there.
– You still see the module.
– You go back to the administrator’s backend on Joomla, you double check if the module is disabled, and it turns out to be really disabled. But you enable it and disable it again, just in case….
– You go back to your website and still see the module active.
– Huh?
– You login as administrator, and you double check again, and you see that the module is indeed disabled? Could it be that you are working on the wrong website (many of our clients run multiple Joomla websites). You check the URL above and it’s definitely the website that you should be working on. Could it be that you’re disabling the wrong module? You search all active and disabled modules and you are now very sure that you are working on the right module.
– You ask this question: “How come my changes on my Joomla website are not showing?”

The reason why your changes are not showing is because you have enabled caching. Caching means that the generated Joomla code (not content) is cached for faster performance. Joomla websites with a medium amount of traffic (1,000+ visitors/day) should enable caching.

So how can you fix this issue? It’s very simple, you clear your Joomla cache. Here’s how:

– Login to your Joomla administrator.
– Go to “Tools”=> “Clean Cache”.
– Click on “Site” (on the menu below, it is next to “Administrator”) .
– Click the main checkbox to select all the cached items.
– Click on “Delete” on the upper right menu.
– Now that you’ve cleared your website’s cache, it is a good time to also clear your backend’s cache.
– On the same page, click on “Administrator”.
– Click the main checkbox to select all the cached items (you can also select each item individually, but since you’re already there it’s better to clean all the cache).
– Again, click on “Delete”.

Now if you’re working on your Joomla website and you’re making changes to your templates/extensions every 5 minutes, it’s better to temporarily disable caching altogether, here’s how:

– Go to “Site”, “Global Configuration” on the menu above.
– Click on “System” on the menu below.
– Change the “Cache” value (under “Cache Settings”, in the middle right of the page) to “No”.
– Click on “Save” on the top menu.

The above applies to Joomla 1.5. It’s possible for the steps to be slightly different in other version of Joomla, but the main concept remains the same.

If you do all the above and you’re still having problems with pages being cached, then contact us, we guarantee you that we’ll solve your problem in 2 hours (for a cost of $150, based on our current fees).