Why We Recommend Against Using Joomla 3.0

A new customer approached us this evening with a problem that is very common on old Joomla versions, the annoying 404 error on the homepage. We thought, that’s odd, this is a very old problem, does it still exist on Joomla 3.0? It wasn’t surprising but it was just…odd!

The first thing that we did was to go the menu item manager and ensure that there is a home menu item (e.g. a menu item that is set to be the homepage). We then thought: maybe the article that it links to doesn’t exist anymore, so we re-chose the same article (it did exist).

We then checked the parent category of the article, it was published and it existed (you will see a 404 problem if the category that the article belongs to is unpublished). What could’ve been wrong?

Needless to say, we spent hours beating around the (wrong) bushes, mainly debugging the article.php file (which is located under the /component/com_content/models directory) because it’s responsible for displaying the article, and because it was throwing the “404 not found” error in line 152:

return JError::raiseError(404, JText::_('COM_CONTENT_ERROR_ARTICLE_NOT_FOUND'));

The above error was thrown mainly if the article didn’t exist, or if it was unpublished – but we were sure that the article existed and that it was published because we were able to re-select it in the menu item for the homepage. So, we continued searching elsewhere. But after nearly 4 hours, we took a look at the website’s article manager in the backend, and we were surprised to see that that article was actually unpublished! How could that be? We were able to select the article in the menu item (which logically meant that it was published). So we published the article and the site worked!

We then, just out of curiosity (and for a quick second – the website wasn’t live yet anyway), unpublished the article again. We then went to the menu item manager, created a new menu item of type Single Article, and (surprise surprise), we were able to choose that unpublished article!

What does that mean? It means that Joomla 3.0 has a huge bug which has some catastrophic consequences on the stability of the website (by the way our customer was using a Joomla 3.0 version that was released just two weeks ago) – and something tells us that it’s not the only bug, and that’s why we don’t recommend using it at all. We’d say wait at least until 2014 when there’s actually a bridge between Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3.5 to migrate easily. Joomla 3.0 should not be labeled as a production CMS, we think it’s still in early beta.

If you are using Joomla 3.0 and you’re having problems with it, then we can definitely help you! All you need to do is to contact us and tell us about the problem and we’ll do the rest. Oh, and you don’t need to worry about our fees, they are very competitive!