Admin Page in Joomla Redirects to Homepage

One of our clients Joomla website had weird error today. When going to http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/administrator, our client was getting redirected to the homepage. We thought the work was easy because it wasn’t the first time we have seen this problem, it was actually the second time.

The first time we saw this problem (where our client’s admin page was redirecting back to the homepage) was a couple of months ago, and after a lot of investigation, we discovered that our client has enabled the JSecure extension and was going to http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/administrator instead of going to http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/administrator/?hashkey. Unfortunately, our client did not remember his JSecure hashkey, so we had to reset it for him. We were able to recover his JSecure hashkey the following way:

• We went to the phpMyAdmin of his database.
• We then went to the jos_plugins table.
• We searched for the the keyword JSecure in that table, and then we opened the associated row.
• The value of Key under the column Params (short for parameters) of that row is the actual hashkey, we sent it to him.

(Note that there was no need to reset the JSecure hashkey/password as it’s stored in clear text)

Now this time it was different, because the client didn’t have JSecure installed at all. We searched for a similar extension, but we couldn’t find any. In fact, our client had a very basic Joomla instance (almost no 3^rd party extensions). Eventually we discovered that the problem lied in his .htaccess file, there was a weird redirect on the top of the file (we didn’t know why the redirect was there in the first place). We removed that redirect and the admin login was showing up again.

Please note that the above two scenarios are just the scenarios that we had with respect to this particular problem, there are potentially other issues causing this, so the above might not take care of the problem you’re having. If this is the case, then just contact us! We’re friendly, we’re fast, and we’re always happy to serve. Our rates are also very competitive.