Are You Unable to Save Anything in Joomla’s Backend?

A new client called us this afternoon and told us that he’s not able to save anything in the backend of his Joomla website. Articles, categories, menu items, modules, etc… are all not saving. He gave us his Joomla credentials, we logged in to his account, and we verified that he indeed had this problem: clicking on the “Save” button doesn’t do anything. Additionally, there were other issues such as “selection popups” not working (selection popups are those popups where one chooses, for example, an article for a menu item manager of type Single Article).

Clearly, the backend of our new client was completely dysfunctional. But, on the bright side, we have seen this issue before…

You see, any Joomla developer worth his salt knows that when this happens, it usually means that there is a nasty JavaScript error somewhere on the page breaking some critical functionalities on the website. So we looked at Chrome’s console and true enough, we saw this error:

HTMLDivElement Error

Figure 1: HTMLDivElement Error on Google Chrome

Why did that happen? And more importantly, how can this be fixed? After a lot of debugging, we discovered that some of the JavaScript files that our client had in the media directory were not compatible with his Joomla version. Apparently, he just migrated his website to Joomla 2.5 with another company and what they did was that they just copied the media folder from the old Joomla Website to the new Joomla Website, thinking that the media folder only contains images and other non-important stuff (like the images folder).

What did we do to fix the problem?

Fixing the problem, once we knew the cause, was simple. All that we needed to do was to overwrite his media folder with the media folder of a fresh install of a version of a clean Joomla install that was identical to his (yes, we know that this is a long sentence – sorry about that!)

In case you’re having a similar issue on your website, then try to overwrite your media folder of that of a similar (clean) Joomla installation. If that doesn’t work, then probably it’s time to contact us. We’re always there, we’re hard workers, we’re Joomla experts, and we don’t charge much.

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