We manage very large Joomla installations, and a constant question we get from editors working on these websites is: “I am trying to order articles on my website, but it is not working, how do we do that?” And then we start to explain that first they need to choose the category when listing articles […]

One of our non-regular Joomla clients revealed to us their wish to build their own CMS. They told us that the number one reason why they’re doing this is because maintaining a large Joomla website is very costly. They also cited other reasons, including having to go through the trouble of updating their site every […]

Almost all Joomla administrators do not think about disabling any core plugins that are enabled by default – which is a fine approach, but not when you’re running a large site. Some of these plugins have very little use for many Joomla sites and, as such, they are better off disabled. Take, for example, the […]

Back in January 2011 (7 years and 1 month ago), people started migrating from Joomla to WordPress or Drupal in droves. The main reason for this mass exodus was the absence of a non-technical migration script from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.6 which left many Joomla administrators with 3 options: 1) pay a lot of […]

Increasingly, we are getting requests from clients asking us to increase the Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) score of their Joomla sites. Some of them even ask us to get them a score of a 100, which can only be possible if the Joomla website is an extremely basic one. We usually respond that any score […]

Note: This a very lengthy post. So, it’ll be a good idea to read it first thing in the morning when your mind is fresh and while you’re having your wake up coffee (or tea, or milk, or cold water, or nothing). Another note: This is a very technical and a very advanced post. It […]

A few weeks ago, we discussed the main advantages that WordPress has over Joomla. One of these advantages is the fact that WordPress has full time developers and a huge testing team. Of course, for those of us working with Joomla, we know that this isn’t the case for our beloved CMS. Joomla is supported […]

WordPress, the most used CMS in the world, with around 9 times the market share of Joomla, is not better than Joomla. In fact, we think that Joomla is a much better product, and this is why: Joomla uses MVC in its code, WordPress doesn’t. The term Spaghetti Code is a great fit for WordPress. […]

Note: In this post, by “core file” we mean a Joomla file that cannot be overridden at the template level. We have a somehow hawkish attitude when it comes to optimizing Joomla: we are not afraid of using core modifications (e.g. core hacks) to optimize/secure Joomla websites. For that, we are often criticized by some […]

A new client called us a couple of hours ago and told us that he had a problem on the VirtueMart store on his Joomla website. He said that early in the morning a client called him and asked him about the status of his one week old order which he paid for through PayPal. […]

Note: This post is a rant! Proceed at your own risk! When Joomla 3.6 was released, most of those who updated their websites started complaining: I added a new article, but I can’t find it anywhere on my website. What is the problem? The problem is that someone (you know yourself if you’re reading this!), […]

Most people using Joomla are very quick to blame it (Joomla) for any hiccups/problems they see on their websites. In most cases, these people are wrong. In fact, the majority of the problems happening on Joomla websites are not technically caused by Joomla’s core, but they are caused by one of the following: A change […]

Rumors spread around quickly, and the latest rumor, besides the one that states that the world is not flat, is that Joomla 3.5 is 50% faster than Joomla 3.4.8. To be more specific, the rumor states that Joomla 3.5 is 50% faster because, unlike Joomla 3.4.8, it can run under PHP 7. So, the rumor […]

Joomla 1.5, probably the most used Joomla version ever, officially died back in 2012. Back then, many Joomla administrators were faced with a dilemma: Should we migrate our Joomla website(s) to 2.5? Or should we switch to another CMS? The decision was not easy, because in many cases, the costs of migrating to Joomla 2.5 […]

Note: The below is a rant – we just wanted to let you know beforehand in case you’re not in the mood for a rant on a Friday afternoon. One of the things that we do when optimizing a large Joomla website is tweaking MySQL’s settings in the my.cnf configuration file (this file is typically […]

Joomla 3.5 is supposed to be released on November 15th, in exactly ten days from now, but we all know that this won’t happen, because Joomla 3.4 was supposed to be released on September 15th, and, even almost 2 months later, it’s still in the Joomla oven. But that’s not the real problem, the real […]

One of the most annoying, and needless plugins on Joomla is the email cloaking content plugin. For those of you who don’t know what this plugin is, it translates any email (a string that matches an email pattern) to JavaScript obfuscated code in order to prevent spammers from picking up that email and ultimately spamming […]

We had a call from one of our clients yesterday – she told us that her hosting company shut down her website because it was hacked and told her that they can’t reactivate the website unless the website is cleaned up or unless she subscribes to a security plan that costs $99/month. Our client ran […]

We are firm believers that Joomla must be a very light product. We think that all useless extensions should be removed from Joomla. Yes, you heard that right, there are few extensions in Joomla that are useless and must be removed, and they are: Banners: If there is one extension that has been consistently used […]

We have been working with Joomla for nearly a decade now (actually, more than a decade if you include the time we worked with Mambo), and we know it inside out. Joomla is a great CMS, and, in our humble opinion, it is the best CMS. Having said that, there is still room for improvement, […]

We get constant calls from clients telling us that their Joomla websites were hacked, that they are seeing, in the User Manager, new and suspicious users every day, although they don’t have any registration form on their websites. We first comfort them by telling them that their websites are most likely not hacked and what […]

We had a phone call earlier this week from a client telling us that the IT department of his company wants to move the website from Joomla to Drupal. The client was actually the CFO of the company, and he was having a hard time understanding the real reason to switch the website to another […]

Note: This post is a rant. What you will read here is our opinion of Joomla’s cache. There won’t be any “silver bullet” for fixing caching in Joomla in this post. There is one feature in Joomla that gives many Joomla administrators lots and lots of headaches. Can you guess what it is? Well, it’s […]

Cyber Monday is a huge online event in North America (the US and Canada). For those who don’t know what it is exactly, it is the Monday immediately after Thanksgiving, and during that day, online retailers offer huge discounts on their products. Cyber Monday has gotten extremely popular since its inception back in 2005 and […]

After migrating hundreds of Joomla websites from 1.5 to 2.5 (and dozens to 3.2), we have learned 2 things: A migration is never an easy task, and we have explained that, in details, here. VirtueMart is, by far, the most horrible extension to migrate. Since we have already discussed the first point before, let’s focus, […]

Not a day goes by without us noticing this inconsistency in Joomla: it’s confusing, it’s weird, and it’s very dangerous. We know, you have no idea what we’re talking about at the moment. Let us explain… Login to the backend of your Joomla website, and then go to Site -> Global Configuration, and then click […]

At itoctopus, we love to share our knowledge about Joomla. We think that by doing so, we are helping Joomla become an even better CMS. We also like to share our knowledge because we believe in knowledge sharing as a concept that evolves our civilization in general (think about what would have happened if Thomas […]

The Marketing Manager of a large company called us today and told us that they were thinking of moving from Joomla to a custom, homemade CMS. He asked us about our opinion and whether we think they should go forward with the move or not. We told him that we highly recommend against this move, […]

Every once in a while we get a unique project – a project that requires us to dig into every hidden feature in Joomla to know how we can execute it the “clean” way, without making core modifications and without creating tons and tons of code that could’ve been saved if we just used one […]

It seems that every single 3rd party company developing Joomla extensions has either created or is creating a responsive template and is marketing that template to its customer base as the next big thing. Even RSJoomla, a company that we really like and respect, is doing that… We have to say that we’re amazed at […]

Note: This post is extremely advanced and is aimed at Joomla administrators with a solid technical background. We love Joomla. We think that it’s one of the best CMS’s out there, if not the best CMS. That’s why we think it’s good to constructively criticize it from time to time so that it remains where […]

We don’t like to attack Joomla extensions, especially prominent ones. In fact, we can’t remember if we ever did attack an extension on our blog (if you know that we did that before, then please let us know in which post). But this morning something happened, something that made us choose sh404 – the famous […]

The project manager of a very large company that we do work for with called us this evening and told us that they are trying to update one of the modules, and while the change to that module seemed to take effect in the backend, that change wasn’t reflected in the frontend. This issue immediately […]

Note: This post represents an opinion, our opinion, based on the work that we have done on Joomla for the year 2012. We get asked this question a lot: “What is the best Joomla version?” Back in 2011, we used to say it was Joomla 1.5 – but as of May of 2012, we had […]

We’re doing many migrations from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 after people discover (the hard way) that these migrations are not that easy at all! Most of the companies/individuals that we migrate their Joomla websites for have already tried to do the migration themselves by following the (incomplete and broken) guide on Joomla’s official website. […]

We have worked on many government websites powered by Joomla, either directly (through direct contracts with government agencies) or indirectly as sub-contractors. We always love working on government projects, mainly because the requirements are very clear upfront and they are usually very challenging! Today, the owner of a company for which we were sub-contracted to […]

Every since Joomla 2.5 was released last week, customers have been asking us this question: “Is it worth it to upgrade to Joomla 2.5?” That’s a very legitimate question. Our answer to this question is always like this: “It’s worth it as there are some features that are in Joomla 2.5 that do not exist […]

We have been working on Joomla websites since the creation of Joomla (before that we were working on Mambo websites). We consider ourselves Joomla experts, we know all the ins and outs of Joomla. Not only that, we are experts in web development in general, and we can see trends when it comes to web […]

We have worked on many Joomla websites for many customers covering nearly every profession anyone can think of. All of our customers’ websites are great when it comes to content, but most of them are not that great when it comes to design. Some of them are very ugly, and yes, we do tell our […]

Many of our clients, who already have a Joomla website, reach a point where they want to sell products and/or services on their websites. They all come to us with this immediate question: “Is Joomla good for ecommerce?”. Our answer is always: “It depends”. Yes, whether Joomla is good or not for ecommerce depends on […]

While the absolute majority of our customers already have Joomla websites, some of them don’t even have a website and want us to create a website for them using Joomla, or have a website yet or they are using another CMS and they want us to move them to Joomla. These customers ask for Joomla […]