“You are not permitted to use that link to directly access that page” Error when Editing a Joomla Article

After moving the website of a client from a shared host to a dedicated server (with another company), we got a call from the client telling us that she’s experiencing a weird situation.

She told us that when she tries to edit an article on the frontend of the Joomla site, it works the first time, but the second time she clicks on the “Edit” link, she sees the following error:

You are not permitted to use that link to directly access that page

We tried to reproduce the problem on our end, but we couldn’t. So, we asked her to use another browser, and so she used Google Chrome (she was using Safari), and she had the same issue: the first time the edit link worked, and the second time it didn’t.

So, we switched to Chrome (we were using Firefox), and tried to reproduce the problem on our end, and this time, we saw the same error that she was seeing. From our experience, when a problem occurs on one browser and not on another, then it is likely a URL caching problem. So, we disabled browser caching on her Joomla website by adding the following code to the very beginning of the .htaccess file:

<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|php)>
FileETag None
Header unset ETag
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
Header set Expires "Mon, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>

We then tried editing the page on the fronted of the Joomla website, and this time it worked!

Why did the problem start happening when she was moved to the other server?

We are not exactly sure – it might be that there are some global browser caching settings in the httpd.conf file of the Apache web server, but we cannot confirm that.

What if adding the above code doesn’t work?

If the above code doesn’t work, then try disabling the System – Cache plugin and see if it helps. If it still doesn’t, then a good idea would be to analyze the server logs to see how the server is responding to the browser requests. You can also contact us and we’ll fix the problem for you swiftly, professionally, and for a very affordable fee!