A new client called us yesterday and told us that the website of the company he works for is down. He told us that it was displaying a weird error. We immediately visited the website, and we noticed that it was displaying the below error (in red): “1881 – Operation not allowed when innodb_forced_recovery > […]

A regular client who subcontracts work to us emailed us that he wasn’t able to update the website of one of his clients from Joomla 3.8.3 to Joomla 3.8.5. He told us that the update would fail halfway through with the following error: AJAX Loading Error: error Of course, the first thing that we thought […]

Around 10 AM EST yesterday morning, we got a call from a large company telling us that their Joomla website is down as none of their staff members are able to access it. We checked and we were able to access the website. The first thing that came into our minds was that their company […]

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: The solution in this post is a core modification. Proceed with caution. Another note: This post has been modified on January 31st, 2018 to correct an error. The post has originally been published the day before, on January 30th, 2018. While analyzing the performance of the backend of a Joomla 3.8 website that has […]

A client of ours uses a Joomla article for listing internal announcements (the Joomla website is used as an intranet). The Joomla article contains announcements from 2005 and, each time the company has a new announcement (which literally happens at least one time every business day), that announcement is added to the very beginning of […]

Note: This post is advanced and is mainly aimed at system administrators, but any Joomla administrator can still read it and understand the main points as we have simplified it as much as we can. One of our customers constantly emailed us about people getting randomly blocked from accessing their Joomla website. At first, our […]

For a while now, we were noticing intermittent load spikes on the server powering a high traffic Joomla website of a client of ours. These spikes were troubling, because they were caused by neither the MySQL database nor the PHP instance; they were caused by something else, something that we didn’t know what it was […]

Note: This post is somehow technical. Some PHP knowledge is required to understand it. After updating PHP to 7.2 on the server powering the Joomla website of a major client, we noticed that one of the modules became broken. The module was supposed to display some images with a specific size, and, while the images […]

As of January 1st, 2018, itoctopus will no longer be accepting work from individuals, or from very small businesses (less than 5 employees). Let us explain why… As you may already know, itoctopus has been serving businesses of all sizes for over a decade now. That long period of time has provided us with some […]

Yesterday morning, a client emailed us that he wasn’t able to update his Joomla website from version 3.7.5 to version 3.8.3. He told us that he was seeing an “an ajax error of some sort” after clicking on the Update Now button. We immediately thought that he had permission issues on the restore.php file, but […]

Note: This post assumes that you are using WHM and EasyApache 4. If you aren’t using them but are seeing the same problem, then the heart of the solution is correct (you will need to install the proper MySQL extension, but the implementation is different). It was around 2:00 AM last Saturday when were scheduled […]

A new client called us and told us that they are seeing an Internal Server Error (Error 500) after moving their site from one server to another. They told us that they’re sure that all the files were properly moved (they zipped the Joomla website on the origin server and extracted it on the destination […]

As of Joomla 3.8.0 (and so far until Joomla 3.8.2), the articles model in the com_content extension (both frontend and backend) uses DISTINCT in the main query that returns the articles (in the getListQuery function). For the untrained eye, such a change is harmless, but, to anyone who has some experience in MySQL (and any […]

There are many recipes for a disaster out there, our favorite one is the following: One three-pound European white truffle. Eight ripe fruits from a jellyfish tree. 7 drops of fairy tears. One medium sized hair from the tail of a yellow (#ffff00) unicorn. One onion. Just a regular, medium sized onion. A sprinkle of […]

Most people love mystery movies, there is something thrilling about them. We also love mystery movies, but there is something that we love even more, and it is Joomla mysteries, and yesterday we were fortunate enough that we were assigned to investigate one of these mysteries… At around eleven hundred hours yesterday morning, a regular […]

You haven’t done anything on your Joomla website for 4 weeks, and you are the only authorized person that has access to the backend of the website and to the site’s filesystem/database. Yet, you wake up this morning and you find out that your website (frontend and/or backend), is displaying a blank page. You call […]

While optimizing an already optimized K2 powered Joomla website yesterday, we noticed the following query in the slow query log: SELECT i.*, c.name as categoryname,c.id as categoryid, c.alias as categoryalias, c.params as categoryparams FROM #__k2_items as i RIGHT JOIN #__k2_categories AS c ON c.id = i.catid WHERE i.published = 1 AND i.access IN(1,1,5) AND i.trash […]

This past weekend, a client of ours from Kuwait emailed us and told us that the backend of his Joomla website is displaying a blank page. He told us that the login page to the backend was working, but, as soon as you login, you will see a blank page. He also told us that […]

At itoctopus, we have a strong passion for optimizing Joomla websites, that’s why we always research new ways that may improve their performance. We mostly focus on optimizing the database because sometimes a simple database optimization can have a huge impact on the overall performance of the Joomla website. This time it was no different. […]

Yesterday evening (or very early in the morning today), we updated the Joomla website of a new client from Joomla 3.1.5 to Joomla 3.7.5 (we are waiting for 3.8.2 to be released to update to 3.8). The update was really nothing out of the ordinary: we did see some issues but we fixed them immediately […]

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 new client emailed us that he was seeing the following error on his Joomla website: Error displaying the error page He told us that he started seeing the above error when the hosting company moved his website from one server to another. He told us that the hosting company debugged the issue for a […]

A few weeks ago, we wrote a post in which we admitted that we haven’t discovered fire. This morning, however, we had a new discovery akin to discovering fire, and it was a very clean, very elegant, very lovely method to check if a user is a super user. It all happened by coincidence when […]

A new client approached us yesterday and told us that they were seeing a blank page on the frontend and on the backend of their Joomla website after updating it to 3.8.0. Since a blank page is a sign of a fatal error, we set the error reporting on the client’s site to “maximum” in […]

Note: This integration consists of a core override. As usual, please keep in mind that core overrides can lead to stability issues and can be wiped out with a future Joomla update. A client of ours asked us to integrate Joomla’s “Email this Link to a Friend” (or “Send Article to a Friend”) with HubSpot. […]

We often get calls/emails from clients stating that the response time of their Joomla websites is suddenly high. They say that the day before everything was fine, and all of a sudden in the morning, the website became super slow. Of course, the first thing that we ask them is: “Has anything changed between yesterday […]

If you’re into Joomla plugin development, then you are most likely familiar with the onContentBeforeSave and the onContentAfterSave events. The first event is triggered just before someone saves any Joomla content item, and the second event is triggered (you’ve guessed it) just after someone saves a Joomla content item. The onContentBeforeSave event is typically used […]

We love optimization work, there’s always something new to discover, and there’s always something new to learn. Our love for optimization led us to discover a gem, a little optimization gem that literally halved the load of a server powering an extremely large and high traffic Joomla website. As usual, we are always thrilled to […]

A client of ours wanted to integrate webinar purchasing on her Joomla website. She had a GetResponse account where she creates webinars, and she wanted to give her clients the ability to purchase her GetResponse webinars through her website. Unfortunately, GetResponse does not technically allow either directly or indirectly the purchase of webinars. So, in […]

Most administrators check the cron jobs that they have on their server by just logging into their cPanel and clicking on the Cron Jobs link under the Advanced section. The more advanced administrators check their cron jobs by typing the following command in the shell: crontab -e So, in the absolute majority of cases, an […]

A regular client of ours came to us yesterday evening with an interesting task: she wanted to set the Last-Modified HTTP header on an article page to the actual modified date of an article. We thought it was an easy task, until we started working on it. You see, by default, Joomla sets the Last-Modified […]

Note: The solution in this post is a modification to a core file. Proceed at your own risk, and keep in mind that a Joomla update may wipe out your changes. We got a request from a client of ours to display articles from multiple categories on an existing category blog page. As a Joomla […]

Note: The second solution presented in this post consists of a core modification, which means that a future update can overwrite your changes. Always document your core modifications so that you can re-apply them after an update. During the past weekend, we updated the website of one of our clients to Joomla 3.7.5 from Joomla […]

Unlike WordPress, Joomla has the unique ability that allows an administrator to label an article as a featured article, which means that the article will display on a page where the menu item is of type Featured Articles (typically, this page is the homepage). You might think, well, that’s not so special, but there is […]

A few days ago, a client of ours emailed us and told us that some of the pages on her company website were displaying content that was not theirs. The content was not technically malicious, but it consisted of ads, which had nothing to do with the client’s business. Clearly, the website was hacked. Since […]

One of the nice features in Joomla is that you can update the CMS from either the backend or from the filesystem. We typically update our clients’ websites from the backend, but, when we encounter the minor of issues, we update it using the filesystem. Here’s how: We ssh to the server as root and […]

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 […]

A new client called us yesterday afternoon and told us that his company website was displaying a weird page instead of his normal page (his company sells restaurant equipment). The weird page consisted of some gibberish in random languages. It was a no-brainer that the website was hacked. Since the client was in a hurry, […]

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. […]

One of the common bottlenecks on any website, and not just a Joomla website, is large database tables. Large tables, especially those with significant and constant CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) activities, can cause serious load issues on websites. This means that it’s always a good idea to check your Joomla websites for large […]

A new client emailed us back on Saturday (today is Monday), and told us that he was seeing the famous (and dreaded) Invalid Token error whenever he tried to login to his Joomla website. He told us that the whole thing happened all of a sudden. He assured us that he didn’t install a new […]

Every few months, we get a request to execute a Joomla administrator view from a cron job. For example, a recent request consisted of running an administrator view from a cron job in order to grab data from other sites and save them into the Joomla website. Now, if you have dealt with cron jobs […]

A new client called us this morning and told us that the was seeing the following error on his website when he was visiting it: An error has occurred. 500 JHtmlBehavior::polyfill not found So, we visited his website in order to check what is going on, and, to our surprise, we didn’t see the error. […]

At itoctopus, one of the things we are fascinated by is security – we are always researching new ways to improve the security of our managed websites. Our Joomla honeypot experiment, for example, was a huge success and we implemented it for our major clients. It also helped us better understand attack patterns, which, in […]

We are getting calls from Joomla administrators telling us that they are seeing a bizarre warning in the backend of their Joomla sites after updating their sites to 3.7.x. Here is a sample warning: Your PHP version, 5.6.30, is only receiving security fixes at this time from the PHP project. This means your PHP version […]

RSForm Pro is one of the most powerful extensions out there. You can create any type of form with it, and associate any action you can think of when the form is submitted, whether through plugins or through embedded PHP code. This makes RSForm ideal for integrating Joomla with payment gateways (such as Authorize, PayPal, […]

A client with a huge Arabic news website called us on April 26th (the day Joomla 3.7 was released) and told us that he’s not able to save articles after updating to Joomla 3.7. He told us that article saving was timing out, and urged us to take a look. As usual, we obliged. We […]

Joomla 3.7 is a weird iteration of the famous CMS – it seems that quite a few important things were half baked or not completely tested. For example, the new routing functionality that was meant to be completely revamped in Joomla 3.7 was supposedly scratched from that version, to be later introduced in a future […]

At itoctopus, we are paranoid about the security of our managed clients’ websites – as such, we always research revolutionary ways to better protect these websites against potential exploits. Last week, we conducted a honeypot project on one of the largest websites that we manage. For those of you who don’t know what a honeypot […]