“JHTML:icon Not Supported” Error When Migrating to Joomla 2.5

We’re currently migrating a large news website from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 – and we’re facing some weird issues during the migration. For example, while we were able to migrate the articles successfully, clicking on any link (pointing to an article) resulted in the following error:

500 – JHtml: :icon not supported. File not found.

The first thing that we did was to find where this error is being generated, and to find that, we needed to find the language constant that actually contains this error. So we searched for the pattern “*not supported*” in all the language files of a test Joomla 2.5 installation, and we found that the constant containing that error was: JLIB_HTML_ERROR_NOTSUPPORTED_NOFILE.

Our next step was to search for JLIB_HTML_ERROR_NOTSUPPORTED_NOFILE in a Joomla 2.5 installation to see in which file it is called, and we easily found it at line 123 of the html.php file which is located under the /libraries/joomla/html directory. When reading the function that raises this error, we discovered that it was trying to include the file icon.php, and it was expecting it to be under the /libraries/joomla/html directory. The file icon.php did not exist in that directory. So what we did was that we copied that file from the new Joomla website from the directory /components/com_content/helpers to the /public_html/libraries/joomla/html directory and that solved the problem!

Note: Most posts on this topic that claim to solve this problem suggest that you delete the whole com_content folder located under /template/[name-of-your-template]. We strongly recommend against this because while it may resolve the issue, it’ll strip the custom design from the website. So, unless you don’t really care about the design, do not delete that directory.

We realize that Joomla’s migration is a hard task that requires a lot of Joomla experience and (potentially) some solid programming skills – so if you’re migrating your Joomla website from 1.5 to 2.5 and you’re running into all sort of problems, then maybe it’s time you call some Joomla experts to do the job for you. Just contact us and we’ll finish the migration for you in no time (we’ve migrated many Joomla websites so far) – oh, and by the way, our fees are very affordable for what we do!

Update 10/15/2014: You can also add the following code to your template file (such as the default.php file under the templates/[your-template]/html/com_content/article folder):

JHtml::addIncludePath(JPATH_COMPONENT . '/helpers');

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