How to Create a Super Administrator User on Joomla?
From our experience, we know that there are some misconceptions about the Joomla Super Administrator user: You can only have one Super Administrator user per Joomla website. You can not delete the Super Administrator user that was originally created. There is no interface for adding Super Administrators (this is a corollary to the point #1 […]
Strict Standards Error in Joomla
We had an interesting case a couple of days ago, one of our clients came to us and told us that while installing Joomla on a new server, he got the following error (multiple times): Strict Standards: Accessing static property JCache::$_handler as non static in /web/vhosts/ourclientsdomainname.com/libraries/joomla/cache.php on line 420 It was not the first time […]
Running Multiple Websites on a Single Joomla Installation
In some rare cases, you may want to run two (or more) different websites on a single Joomla installation, so you will have different databases but same filesystem. The reason for doing so is to maintain just one Joomla installation (e.g. upgrade, secure, host, etc…) instead of two ore more. At first glance, this seems […]
How to Work on Your Joomla Website Offline?
At one point or the other, you may want to do some major work on your website without jeopardizing your online presence. Obviously, you can’t work on your live Joomla website, you have to work on another copy of your website and then upload it back once all the work is done. There are two […]
How to Create a Custom Form in Joomla?
Custom (or dynamic) forms are forms that website owners can create themselves. Website owners usually need custom forms to create the following types of forms: RSVP forms Quotation/inquiry forms “Tell us about you” forms etc… Unfortunately, Joomla, by default, does not offer administrators the flexibility to create their own custom forms, so what is the […]
How to Convert a WordPress Theme to a Joomla Template
Sometimes, you see a WordPress theme, and you wish there was a version for it in Joomla so you can use it on your website. You start thinking, is there an immediate way to make a WordPress theme work on a Joomla website? The straightforward answer is no. You can’t just make a few modifications […]
How to Remove Sample Data in Joomla
Every now and then, we have clients asking us how to remove the sample data in Joomla. The sample data is the data that the Joomla installer loads into your website during the installation process (note that the Joomla installer asks for your permission to do this). In any case, there are two ways to […]
How to Hide the Joomla Version?
In our small post on how to get the Joomla version, we mentioned that some website developers hide the Joomla version for security reasons. So what are these “security reasons” and how do they hide it? The main reason why some website developers hide the Joomla version is because there are malicious scripts running on […]
How to Know Your Joomla Version
When we receive a support call from a new client, one of the questions that we usually ask is “Which version of Joomla are you using?” In many cases, the client doesn’t know the version, so we check his Joomla website to find out which version he’s using ourselves. What we do is that we […]
Why You Can’t Install an Extension on Joomla
We regularly have clients coming to us and telling us that they are unable to install an extension on their Joomla website. An extension, as most of you would probably know, is any plugin, module, or component. So imagine if you are about to install a simple plugin to display the current temperature on your […]
How to Unlock a Joomla Article?
Literally every week we either receive a phone call or an email from a client telling us that one of his articles is now marked as “checked out” and is locked for editing. They tell us that they’re unable to unlock these articles to edit them. They then ask, why was the article locked in […]
Joomla: Where Is It?
In this post, we have decided to answer 3 common questions that our clients ask us about the location of files/data in Joomla. We hope that this post will help everyone! Where is php.ini in Joomla? php.ini is a PHP system file, and has nothing to do with your Joomla website. php.ini is usually located […]
When to Clear the Cache in Joomla?
As we all know, there’s a caching functionality on Joomla that is activated on most websites. This caching speeds up the website, while ensuring that the freshness of the content is not affected, because Joomla’s default caching only caches php code, and not the content itself. A question on many Joomla website owners is “When […]
How to Add Javascript to Joomla Articles
Note: This post applies to Joomla 1.5. If you have Joomla 1.6, then please contact us, as the procedure is different. Nearly every day we are contacted by one or more of our customers who tell us the following: I have tried to add Javascript code to my website, but it doesn’t work. It seems […]
How to Notify Subscribers When a New Article Is Posted on a Joomla Website?
While Joomla is a very poweful CMS, sometimes it feels as if it lacks some basic features. For example, many of our customers ask us what sort of settings they should change in order to automatically notify their registered users (subscribers) of a new article that is posted on their Joomla website. Our answer is […]
How to Add a Favicon to Your Joomla Website
Everyone loves favicons, they imply professionalism, seriousness, and continuity of the website and the underlying business (Note: itoctopus still doesn’t have a favicon because we are still working on our corporate identity). As such, a lot of our Joomla customers want to know the procedure for adding a favorite icon (aka favicon) to their website. […]
Docman Customization
We had an interesting project yesterday, which consisted of customizing Docman (a Joomla extension that allows you to distribute documents either for free or for a fee on your website) in order to accept subscriptions. Here’s what the client wanted: – If the document is priced at 0, then the registered member can download it […]
How to Retrieve the Non-Cached User Information from Joomla?
First we apologize that this post is very technical, but this is a recurring issue and we thought we’d share the solution with others that may be experiencing this problem. The easiest way to retrieve the information of the current logged in user in Joomla is the following: $user =& JFactory::getUser(); But there is a […]
How to Add New Attributes (Fields) to the User Registration Form in Joomla?
Often, we receive requests for adding new attributes (or fields) to the user registration form in Joomla. Such attributes are usually specific to our client’s industry. A very recent example is a client of ours who runs a small magazine, and wanted to add the following 2 fields: “Registered” (which is of type boolean) and […]
How to Move Your Joomla Website to Another Server?
Not a week goes by without us receiving at least 3 requests to move a Joomla website from one server to the other (or from one hosting account to another). Generally, the process is straightforward, and can be done in 3 methods: Method 1 This method is the easiest one and the most straightforward, and […]
Can Joomla Run on a Windows Server?
Some of our potential clients already have hosting plans on Windows Servers, and they prefer not to switch as they are already familiar with the system, so they come to us and ask us “Can I run Joomla on a Windows Server?” Our answer is: “Of course you can”. Joomla can run on a Windows […]
How to Make Your Joomla Website Faster
Joomla is highly criticized of being slow. We can say, with confidence, that this criticism has grounds. Joomla is indeed slow. This is because Joomla is a very complex CMS and there’s a lot of code that is executed in order to display even the “about us” page of a website. So, what can you […]
How To Create A Logout Menu Item In Joomla?
Sometimes, even the seemingly easiest things are very complicated to in Joomla. One of these easy, yet complicated things to do, is creating a Logout menu item in Joomla. We had this request several times so we thought it would be helpful to share how to do it. Note that the below applies to both […]
How to Change the Database Password in Joomla?
In some situations, you may find yourself forced to change the database password of your Joomla website. Such situations include: Your website just got hacked. You gave all the website credentials (particularly the username and the password of the database) to a developer that you no longer trust. You have a good habit of changing […]
Salvage Your Joomla Website!
Sometimes one of your Joomla database tables (jos_*) , or even your whole Joomla database can become corrupt because of the following: – Hardware failure on your server (you should always pray that this never happens on your server, and if it does, then you should pray that you have a recent backup) – Someone […]
How Do You Add Marquee to Your Joomla Website?
Some of our clients come to us with requests to add a marquee to their Joomla website. Although we always want to have more work, we tell them to do this themselves. Why? Because it’s really easy! All you need to do is to add the following to the text that you want to have […]
How to Add Background Music To Your Joomla Website
Some of our clients ask us to add background musing on their Joomla website. Typical requirements include: I want to play Song X on my website. I want the music to play on all browsers. I don’t want the music to stop if the person moves from one page to the other. Playing music is […]
How to Fix Joomla’s Problem With session.save_path
We have previously examined a problem where one of our clients was not able to login to the administrator’s control panel, and we have concluded that the root of the problem is that PHP was unable to write the session information to the filesystem because it doesn’t have the proper permissions. This problem often happens […]
How to Accept Payments on a Joomla Website?
There are many reasons why someone would want to accept a payment on his website, including: – He might be selling a product – He might be selling a service – He might be accepting donation But if that someone happens to run a Joomla website, how an he accept payments? Like everything in life, […]
Blank Page on Joomla Login
One of Joomla’s interesting (and common) problems is when a user logs in to Joomla’s administrator’s control panel only to be greeted by a blank page instead of seeing Joomla’s control panel. The blank page doesn’t have any code in it, at all, not even the <html> and the <body> tags. So what’s going on? […]
My Joomla Changes Are Not Showing!
If you’re reading this post then probably the following has happened (or is currently happening) to you: – You disable a module (or change a template, or disable/enable/update any extension). – You go to your website and check if the module is no longer there. – You still see the module. – You go back […]
Are You Suddenly Unable To Login to Your Joomla Administrator?
One of our little projects today was interesting. The owner of the website was not able to login to his Joomla’s Administrator. Here is what we knew about the problem when we first started working on it: – The website was using Joomla 1.0x (which is more Mambo than Joomla). – The owner of the […]
Multiple Categories on JEvents
Many of our clients want to have multiple categories on Joomla’s JEevents (An event component for Joomla). We always accommodate the request, and here’s how: – We create a field called “multiple_categories” in the main events table. – We change the field type of categories from a single select to a multiple select (see below) […]