Very early in the morning today, a new client sent us the following email: “Hi, We have a Joomla 1.5 website that has been working well for a long time. Yesterday, our host decided to upgrade PHP, which resulted in the following problem on our website: checkboxes are no longer visible anywhere in the backend […]
While working on making a very large website responsive over the past few days, we were faced by a small blip. A small, but interesting (and annoying) blip… We wanted to show a different layout for a custom made module (we’re not talking here about Joomla’s Custom HTML module [which is now called just the […]
It’s Friday – time for everyone to relax a bit and plan for the weekend! Everyone, of course, except for us! We work 24/7/365! In fact, last Sunday, a client emailed us and told us that they have a problem when editing articles in Joomla’s backend: whenever they click on an article to edit it, […]
An important client of ours emailed us yesterday and told us that they were having the following problem: whenever they edit an article, save it (or close it), and then try to re-open it, they are redirected back to the Articles Manager page (instead of being redirected to the edit page of the article). They […]
Note: This post contains core modifications. If you’re not comfortable with doing core modifications, then please ask some Joomla experts to do it for you. Another note: This post assumes that your website doesn’t allow users to login to the frontend – if that’s not the case then please be aware that the modifications below […]
One of the really nice features that Joomla has is loading modules within articles using loadmodule or loadposition (or using an 3rd party extension such as Modules Anywhere). It is an excellent functionality that permits Joomla administrators to leverage the power of modules within articles (or even within modules if using Modules Anywhere). That flexibility, […]
A client emailed us very early in the morning and told us that whenever he tried to access the login page of the backend of his Joomla website (e.g. http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/administrator ), he was seeing a 500 Internal Server Error page. He told us that the frontend worked flawlessly, and the problem was only in the […]
Note: This post is very advanced and is targeted at system administrators and advanced programmers. Another note: The aim of this post is strictly to promote security on Joomla websites and to investigate potential threats. It is not aimed at teaching others how to exploit websites. After reading a post this morning on the dangers […]
One of the first things that we used to do to resolve a substantial part of load issues caused by a Joomla website was to switch the main content tables from MySQL InnoDB database engine to MySQL MyISAM. The results were always impressive. Nevertheless, we always had conflicting feelings after the switch: while we were […]
A client called us very early this morning and told us that after he updated to Joomla 3.6 (from Joomla 3.5.1), he was seeing the following fatal error on the Joomla backend: The File Cache Storage is not supported on this platform. We immediately investigated the issue (it was around 5 AM), and we realized […]
Over the course of the last decade, we have unhacked and secured many Joomla websites ranging in size from very small to very large. In most cases, cleaning up a Joomla website consists of the following steps: Blocking all traffic to the website. Backing up the website. Overwriting the core files from a fresh Joomla […]
Yesterday (Friday) we explained how a full disk brought the Joomla website of a client of ours completely down. We also mentioned that we upgraded the VPS plan of that client to a more generous plan in terms of disk drive and memory – what we didn’t mention, however, was that the VPS upgrade did […]
A regular client of ours called us a couple of hours ago and told us that her company’s website was down, and she was seeing a weird error when trying to login to the administrator section of her Joomla website. We immediately checked the website and we noticed that the website was complaining about too […]
Note: This post assumes a WHM based environment. If you are using Plesk or anything else, then the log path may be different. Please take that into consideration. With time, most websites will have an increasing number of 404 pages. This is natural and it is caused by changes in the link structure, wrong incoming […]
A client emailed us this Saturday morning and told us that he’s not able to see the Save button when he opens any content item for editing (such as articles, categories, modules, etc…). So we logged in to the backend of his website and we noticed that not only the Save button was missing, but […]
Back in May (today is the 21st of June, the day that should have been the summer solstice, but instead it was yesterday, since this year is a leap year [you learn something new every day!]) we had a client who approached us with a very weird problem. The client’s problem, to put it simply, […]
It’s been a long while since you have last updated the content of your Joomla website, but you decided, on a Sunday afternoon, to do just that. So, you navigate to the login page of the backend of your Joomla website, and you see a curious “Secret Field” input field. You ignore it, and you […]
We were commissioned yesterday morning to move a website form GoDaddy’s shared hosting to a VPS (with another company). So, we zipped the files and we exported the database from the old server, and then we extracted the files and imported the database on the new server. We then proceeded with testing the website (after […]
A client called us yesterday and told us that his website was displaying the following error after a manual upgrade of his Joomla 3.1.1 website to Joomla 3.5.1: Fatal error: Call to a member function getDocument() on a non-object in plugins/system/sef/sef.php on line 36 We then asked him, what do you mean exactly by a […]
Late this evening, a client called us and told us that, after moving his website to a new host, he was seeing the following (fatal) everywhere on his website: Error displaying the error page: Application Instantiation Error Typically, the above error is associated with wrong database credentials in the configuration.php file, so we tried the […]
Yesterday, we were commissioned to move a large website (for a US clinic) from one server to another: we moved the files, we installed the database, we modified the configuration.php file to reflect the new server’s settings, we modified our Windows hosts file (to force the domain to point to the new IP), and then […]
Last week, we were commissioned to build a tool that displays a list of state representatives on the website of a company producing soda dispensers. The tool consisted of a simple dropdown, containing all the American states, and, based on the selected state from the dropdown, the tool displayed the representatives serving the selected state. […]
This evening, a new client from Florida approached us with what seemed to be a very easy issue: whenever he tried to login to the backend of his Joomla website with his super user (aka super administrator) account, he was seeing the following error: Login denied! Your account has either been blocked or you have […]
A client emailed us this Saturday morning and told us that he was seeing a blank page on every page on his website. Clearly that was the sign of a fatal error. Naturally, all we had to do was to search through the logs in order to find out what the problem is; it didn’t […]
Note: The solution presented in this post consists of a core modification, since it addresses a Joomla bug. Proceed at your own risk and always backup your Joomla website before modifying core files. Oh, and don’t forget that future Joomla updates may wipe out your changes (so you may need to redo them after each […]
We had an interesting job today: a regular client called us in the morning and told us that he can’t get URL rewriting to work on his Joomla 3.5.1 website. He told us that when he set Use URL Rewriting to Yes in the Joomla’s Global Configuration, all the URLs, with the exception of the […]
Trivia: The title of this post is inspired by the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, which is somehow unique (in our humble opinion), but please don’t unfriend us if you don’t like it. The notion of aging backwards is fascinating, original, and, to some extent, true. While examining the Joomla website of a […]
Warning: The code changes in this post are in the core. Proceed with caution (and at your own risk) and keep in mind that future Joomla updates may wipe out the below changes. In a previous post, we have explained how we resolved performance issues caused by pagination on a large Joomla website. The results […]
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 […]
Warning: The solution presented in this post consists of a core modification, which means a future Joomla update may wipe it out. You have been warned! If you check the MySQL slow query log of a large Joomla website, you will probably see something like the below query: SELECT a.id, a.title, a.alias, a.introtext, a.fulltext, a.checked_out, […]
A regular client called us a week ago and told us that, after moving his Joomla website to a larger hard drive, it started crashing constantly. We checked the load on his server and it was super high (in the double digits) which explained the constant crashing, but didn’t really reveal the root cause. So, […]
For the somewhat technically savvy, the title of this post may seem like an oxymoron: Joomla 3.x should run very well on any PHP version ranging from 5.3.10 through version 7! So why should it have a problem with PHP 5.5 (or higher versions of PHP)? To answer this question, let us tell you a […]
We received the following email from a client yesterday: “I’ve had a problem for about a year with my company website. It makes me attempt the login 3-5 times before getting into the backend, and then when I’m in, I have to save any change I make to the site either 2, 3, or 4 […]
A high traffic law news website that we have worked on many times had a long-time problem with Google News – a problem that we were made aware of a few weeks ago. It wasn’t a serious problem, but it was quite annoying: whenever they posted a new article on the website, Google News would […]
Note: The solution presented in this post consists of a core modification. Core modifications may be wiped out with future Joomla updates. Please keep that in mind should you decide to implement it. Last Thursday, a regular reader of a client’s website emailed our client and told them that whenever he likes an article on […]
When you start delving into the wonderful world of Joomla, you will soon know that it has many mysteries; some of which you are curious to know everything about, others of which you prefer to leave alone. In the latter category, we can think of one mystery, the Redirect Manager‘s Advanced Mode. Before explaining what […]
Note: This post is very advanced, and requires some Linux shell experience. If you feel that your experience is not up to the suggestions below, then we suggest that you ask some experts to do it for you. Another note: Please read the post to the end before performing any work. Recently, Apache‘s ModSecurity has […]
We had a curious case last week. A client called us and told us that his website’s K2 RSS feed was not working. He was using FeedBurner, and he told us that it (FeedBurner) was displaying content that was weeks old instead of displaying the fresh content from his website. So, we checked the website […]
If you’re an avid reader of our blog, then you may already know that we’re not huge fans of sh404SEF. In fact, we have gained expertise in getting rid of it on large websites. So when something wrong happens to a website that has sh40SEF installed, we immediately suspect this notorious extension, and usually, we […]
A client of hours with a high traffic Joomla website called us and told us that everyday during peak hours, their website slowed to a crawl. So, as usual, we ssh’d to their server and we checked the slow query log and we didn’t notice anything unusual, which was unusual (even though the long-query-time was […]
We were busy most of the month doing emergency updates for our clients since Joomla had several critical updates in a row. Most updates went smoothly, but several didn’t. One update, for example, caused the following error to display on the homepage: DateTime::__construct(): Failed to parse time string (Never) at position 0 (N): The timezone […]
A new client of ours emailed us and told us that whenever he visits his website, he’s seeing the following error: The connection was reset. The above error is displayed when he’s using FireFox. When he uses Chrome, his website also crashes but with the following (different) error: No data received Now, we worked on […]
Note: This post is slightly oriented for programmers. We just wanted to let you know before reading it in case you found it a bit too technical for your taste! Another note: The solution presented in this post requires a core modification since it is addressing a bug in Joomla’s core. Proceed with caution and […]
A client of ours, running a Joomla 3.4.6 website and not wanting to update to the seemingly rushed 3.4.7 asked us to update the PHP instance powering his website from PHP 5.4.44 (which has a known exploit when it comes to the serialization and unserialization of data) to close all known exploits on his server. […]
Note: The guide described in this post, although straightforward, is probably better performed by a system administrator as there’s always a chance of a glitch while tinkering with the server’s Apache and PHP installations. Last week, we were commissioned to create a microsite for a large clients of ours. The microsite consisted of copying a […]
This very morning, the head administrator of a Joomla intranet website belonging to an extremely reputable university in the US Northeast (that university is a client of ours), called us and told us that whenever he goes to the Article Manager page on Joomla’s backend, he sees a blank page (despite the fact that his […]
A client of us called us and told us that they were were experiencing huge slowdowns when using JComments in the backend – such slowdowns were affecting the whole website and sometimes lasting for several minutes! After a quick investigation in the slow query log, we were able to isolate the 3 queries causing the […]
Note: This post is about updating a Joomla website, and not migrating it. See the difference between the two here. A few weeks ago, Joomla released Joomla 3.4.5, which is a critical security update that closes a SQL injection exploit existing in previous versions of Joomla. At the time of its release, we got so […]
A client of ours emailed us a few days ago and told us that whenever he tries to access his website, he’s seeing the following error: Bad Request: Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Size of a request header field exceeds server limit. He told us that he was the […]
We had a very curious case today: an occasional customer of ours emailed us and told us that for the past few months they weren’t able to see the administrator menu in the backend. They temporarily addressed the problem by installing an extension called Admin Menu Manager, which provided an alternative for generating the admin […]