This very morning, the head administrator of a Joomla intranet website belonging to an extremely reputable university in the US Northeast (that university is a client of ours), called us and told us that whenever he goes to the Article Manager page on Joomla’s backend, he sees a blank page (despite the fact that his Error Reporting was set to Maximum in the Joomla’s global configuration). So we told him the following, just close your browser (all instances of the browser), and then open it again, and then try visiting the Article Manager page.
So he did that, and, unsurprisingly, we heard a loud “Huh?” on the phone immediately followed by “You guys are geniuses! It’s working now! But how?”
While we were tempted to claim that we performed some magic on our end to solve this problem, our open-knowledge nature eventually prevailed and we explained to the customer why closing the browser and re-opening it solved the problem. Now let us explain it for you, our dear reader!
Over the years, we have worked on Joomla every single day, and so we know almost everything about it, and we know the cause of the absolute majority of snags that Joomla administrators hit. You see, our client, when he was in the Article Manager page, he filtered on a specific category, and then, on the top right, he selected All instead of 20 to display all articles belonging to that category. After he finished his work on that particular category, he removed the category filtering and the website crashed because Joomla was trying to load all the articles in all the categories (since All was still selected), which made his PHP instance run out of memory.
But, is there a way to solve this problem without closing the browser?
We understand that some times you are running some important applications on the browser and you just can’t close it, and so another way to solve the problem would be to use another browser. But, if you don’t have another browser (some corporations restrict their employees to using one browser, which is typically Internet Explorer), then you can just go to phpMyAdmin, select the database powering your Joomla website, and then clear the #__session table by issuing the following:
TRUNCATE TABLE #__session
But, what if I really want to see all the articles in one shot?
If you have that very strange urge, then you can just increase the memory available for PHP (we have explained how to do this before here). Keep in mind that increasing the memory is a two-edged sword, as while it will fix your problem, it may lead to the whole system running out of memory and thus resorting to swap which will slow down the whole server, eventually crashing the website.
We hope that the above guide helped you fix your problem. If you still have the same issue even after closing your browser and increasing the memory, or if you feel that this issue is a bit too technical for your taste, then please contact us. We’ll do the work for you professionally, quickly, and for a very competitive fee!