RSForm Not Working on Your Joomla Website?

We are currently working on a very interesting project. The project consists of a migration of a Joomla website to another sever, as well as several major fixes to the website. One of these “fixes” revolve around an RSForm Form, that doesn’t work. The form seems to submit, but then redirects back to itself (instead of going to specified thank you page), without populating the database, and without sending the necessary emails.

After analyzing the problem, we have discovered that it’s related to 3 issues:

  1. Caching
  2. SEF
  3. Captchas

The problem was indeed very weird. We did the necessary research on it, and we discovered that the people at RSFom are aware of it, and they told their uses to fix it using a hack, which is very annoying. The hack mainly consists of using a non-SEF link to access the form itself. We thought (Ehemm…) that we can do better!

After a lot of analysis, we discovered that the problem lies in the System Cache plugin. This was already confirmed by the RSForm people but we needed to make sure. So, in order to fix the problem, we need to ensure that all the forms that we have do not use the System Cache plugin. Here’s what we did:

  • We opened the file cache.php, which is located under /yourjoomlawebsite/plugins/system.
  • We created an exception, in every function, that explicitly tells the function to avoid running any script if the page is one of these forms (we used the $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] to check for the page name).
  • We saved the file and we uploaded it back.
  • The RSForm still didn’t work!

Odd!

We then tried creating the exact same form: We created a form and we copied all the fields to the new form. We tried the form and it worked! So, apparently what we did solved the problem, so how come the first form still doesn’t work?

After heavy investigation, we discovered that the form had another problem: The form had a catpcha, layout autgeneration was disabled, and the custom layout did not include the captcha at all. We fixed this problem and now the form works! (Hooray!)

We have to say that the RSForm is one of the better extensions that we work on, but, as with all other extensions, it has its own quirks! And, there was one wise Joomla expert that once said: “No matter what you do, there will be a day when cache and SEF are going to bite you!”

If you have an RSForm that doesn’t work, and if you need help doing the above or if doing the above doesn’t work for you, then feel free to contact us, we’re here to help! We’ll do the job in record time and our rates are very fair!

3 Responses to “RSForm Not Working on Your Joomla Website?”
  1. Comment by David — January 20, 2014 @ 12:33 pm

    Nice work. Just ran into the same issue and bt a long process of trial and error came to the same conclusion as you did. THEN I found your post…

  2. Comment by Christine — July 22, 2015 @ 8:09 pm

    Hello,

    Can you please guide me on how you fix the problem with captcha?

    I am having an issue with the captcha on IE9 only on the RSform. After filling the form and captcha it says that the captcha is required so I do it again but I always get the same error message. It seems that the captcha value is not recognized in IE9.

  3. Comment by Fadi — July 23, 2015 @ 9:05 pm

    Hi Christine,

    Since the error only occurs in IE9, then it is browser specific. Open the console log in IE9 by pressing F12 and then click on the “Console” tab, refresh the page, and post whatever error you see on the console here. Unlike Chrome and Firefox, IE9 is a finicky browser and it does have some issues because of this.

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