A substantial chunk of our work consists of optimizing Joomla websites. As such, we have gathered over the years a vast experience in that particular field and we almost know every variation of the problem as well as its causes. In this post, we would like to share our knowledge with our readers by providing […]

We had a client today complaining that when he clicks on the New button in Joomla’s Article Manager page, he has to wait for a long time for the Add New Article page to appear (the problem also happens when he clicks on an existing article in the Article Manager page to edit it). We […]

Note: The solution presented in this post requires a core modification. As you may probably know by now, core modifications are delicate and may be wiped out with the next Joomla update. Please proceed with caution if you elect to implement the below. If you’re running a high traffic Joomla website, then you probably have […]

Late last night, a new client called us and told us that he can’t login to his Joomla website; that he’s being redirected to the login page with no errors when he logs in with either correct or wrong credentials. Of course, we’ve seen this issue several times, and so we thought it was an […]

For the past few days, we were working on optimizing a super large Joomla website. No, make that mega-large: we’re talking about a website that gets 100,000 uniques and around 700,000 impressions every day (yes, that’s every day). The website in question is a news website that is ranked in the top 20 websites in […]

We are getting an increasing number of requests asking us to add the JavaScript code for the Google Tag Manager (which is another tracking tool mainly used by marketing departments). We have decided, in this post, to share a quick and simple guide on how to do this. First thing you will need is to […]

Joomla’s issues caused by caching are many, but one of these issues is extremely annoying and we are surprised how the Joomla development team hasn’t come up with a solid solution to it yet. In case you’re still wondering what the issue is, then it is no other than the conflict between hit counting and […]

Note: The solution presented in this post requires, ahem, a slight modification in a core file. Proceed with caution, and keep in mind that any change you make may be no more when you update your Joomla website. A couple of hours ago, a high level developer working for a major client of ours told […]

Note: The solution presented in this post involves a modification to a core Joomla file. Please proceed with caution and keep in mind that a core modification can be wiped out with a future Joomla update, potentially breaking your website (or, at best, breaking your website’s links). Every now and then, a client calls us […]

One of our very large clients had a weird problem on a newly migrated Joomla website: everything was working properly on the website, except for the fact that they couldn’t add any contact (in the Contacts component) because the “Save” button wasn’t there. In fact, the only button that they could see was the “Cancel” […]

Note: This post applies to Joomla 2.5 only. If you’re running Joomla 3.x and you can’t delete articles from Joomla’s trash, then please let us know in the comment section of this post as the below solution will not work for you. Yes – we know – our regular readers might say that we have […]

One of our newer clients called us yesterday morning and told us that his Joomla website was running very slow. So we checked his website and we immediately knew the cause of the problem, Mosets! If you are a regular reader of our blog, then you probably know that we don’t think highly of this […]

A client called us earlier this week and told us that when he logs in to his Joomla website and he checks which users are logged in to the website, he only sees the login date. Given that all his users login nearly every day, just seeing the date wasn’t enough for him. He also […]

A large company (that we have worked with before) emailed on us on Friday morning and told us that they were seeing a blank page on their homepage. When we visited the website we noticed that the page was almost blank. In fact, there was some content on the website. But the main component and […]

Yesterday, we had a new customer, from Denmark, with a very nice Joomla website, asking us to fix one of the most annoying Joomla problems. The problem was that whenever he tried to login from the backend, he was getting redirected back to the login page without any error. He was confident that the username […]

A new client of ours called us today and told us that he’s facing a major challenge after migrating his Joomla website from 1.5.26 to 3.4.1. He told us that the No Parent option seems to be missing from the Parent dropdown in Edit Category mode, which meant that whenever he tries to add a […]

We were commissioned yesterday to optimize a large Joomla website. That website was using FlexiContent as its content engine. In case you don’t know, FlexiContent extends Joomla’s core content management system, and does not replace it (unlike K2). The main reason why our client was using FlexiContent was that it supports multiple categories (per article). […]

This weekend we had a very interesting task. We were told, by one of our top clients, to display a list of all their Pages from HubSpot, along with a link to them. As usual, we obliged, and we were glad that they gave us this task, because it was something that we haven’t done […]

Lately, we spent a lot of time working on a project integrating ListHub, the famous MLS platform, on an existing Joomla website. The project consisted of finding “special” listings (those listings with special criteria) within ListHub‘s listings and then displaying them on the site. Despite the fact that it was our third project that consisted […]

We can never praise K2 enough – we think it handles content even better than Joomla (we did write a post about its advantages). It’s not perfect though, and it does, occasionally, suffer from some inconsistencies. For example, if you’re editing an item in K2, and you scroll down to the bottom of the editor, […]

Many Joomla administrators make the mistake by uploading all their images to the root directory of the images folder. A mistake, as they all soon discover, that can cause the media manager to crash. At itoctopus, we have come up with a solution to this problem, and we call it: EDIJ (short for Evenly Distributing […]

Before we begin, let us explain what swap is… Swap, in server terms, is hard disk space reserved by the system to be used as a backup memory in case the RAM is fully used. Once a server starts using swap memory, then you will notice some degradation in the performance because the RAM is […]

A new international client called us very early in the morning today and told us that he was seeing the following error when trying to access his website: “The requested URL index.php was not found on this server.” We immediately checked the problem and we noticed that the error was on every page – so […]

We’re not the biggest fans of Joomla’s Email Cloaking plugin; we think it’s useless. But, obviously, the Joomla development team doesn’t agree with us as the plugin still exists in Joomla 3.4.x (the latest version of Joomla at time of writing this post). Additionally, there are still many Joomla websites who still use this plugin […]

One of our clients called us today and told us that they were trying to save an Event in the DPCalendar extension, and they were getting an Internal Server Error. They said that the same problem was happening when they were trying to save a blog in EasyBlog. From our experience, the majority of Internal […]

A huge racing website that we manage sends out daily newsletters using AcyMailing (the famous newsletter extension for Joomla), and every time those newsletters are sent, the website slows down gradually and eventually crawls to a halt. The whole performance degradation time is typically only a few minutes, which has always been tolerable by the […]

A client called us back on Friday and told us that his company was having some serious load issues on its high traffic corporate website (which was, or course, using a Joomla website). Usually, when there are performance issues on a website, the first thing that we check is the slow query log (typically located […]

We are getting an increasing number of clients telling us that they want to display certain modules only for mobile devices (and some other modules only for computers). This is very normal, since all websites are seeing a dramatic increase in mobile traffic, a fact that is causing businesses to target mobile visitors with some […]

One of our regular clients was seeing the following error when trying to view the VirtueMart orders in the backend of his Joomla 3.3.6 website: Error displaying the error page: Could not connect to MySQL.: MySQL server has gone away SQL=SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS o.*, CONCAT_WS(‘ ‘,u.first_name,u.middle_name,u.last_name) AS order_name ,u.email as order_email,pm.payment_name AS payment_method FROM #__virtuemart_orders as […]

One of the extremely convenient (and very cool) features in RSForm Pro is the Calculations feature. The Calculations feature can be found by logging to the backend of the Joomla website, and then by going to RS Form Pro -> Manage Forms, and then clicking on the form you wish to add the calculations to, […]

One of our clients was getting the following error after upgrading Joomla from 3.3.6 to 3.4: Fatal error: Call to undefined method stdClass::render() in /components/com_jcomments/libraries/joomlatune/template.php on line 318 He told us that immediately after he upgraded to Joomla 3.4, JComments (the famous Joomla commenting platform), stopped working (clicking on the Add Comments link stopped working). […]

If you have already optimized many of the slow queries on your Joomla website using the power of the MySQL slow query log, and yet MySQL is still putting some pressure on your server load, then a good idea would be to check which indexless queries are being executed by your database server. By indexless […]

Note: The solution in this post is compatible with all versions of Joomla that are 2.5 and above (as of March 2015). Another note: This solution will always work on compatible Joomla versions. Warning: The solution in this post is a core modification – this means that your changes will be possibly wiped out with […]

A couple of days ago a client called us and told us that whenever someone tries to click on a link in an ACYMailing newsletter, he was seeing a blank page. The client assured us that he didn’t change anything in the code. If you have been reading our blog for a while, then you […]

A new client emailed us yesterday and told us that every time he tries to login to the backend of his Joomla website, he’s redirected to the login page with no errors (our client called this issue “the admin login loop”). So the first thing that we asked him is whether he checked our post […]

A new client called us and told us that a newly created menu of his, which is created out of another menu, does not work. He said that none of the links work in the new menu, despite the fact that they work in the other menu. So we looked into the issue and we […]

404: it’s probably the most known number in the Internet world, and it means that the page is not found. Ironically, 200, the response code that one will get when the page is found and everything’s OK, is not nearly as known. This, from our psychological perspective, sheds a light on the pessimistic nature of […]

A client called us around 1:30 AM this morning, and told us that his website went down all of a sudden. We checked the website and here’s the error that we saw: No Input File Specified Hmmm… It was probably the first time that we saw this error and so we started by debugging the […]

In this day and age, everyone wants more content on their website (after all, content is king), so for many, this post won’t make any sense. But for some, it does. In fact, we had some clients who actually wanted to reset the content of their Joomla website, despite the potential SEO implications (which we […]

Blank pages on Joomla sites: we thought we have seen them all. But today, we discovered that there might still be a few reasons that we don’t know of that cause blank pages on Joomla sites. Here’s what happened… A new client called us this morning and told us that he was seeing a blank […]

Warning: This is an extremely advanced post that requires some serious system administration skills and some serious programming skills. If you feel you’re not up to it, then don’t do it! Ask some Joomla experts (such as, ahem, us!) to do the implementation for you – you’ll save time and your blood pressure will not […]

A new client called us this morning and told us that whenever someone tries registering on his website, he gets the following error: Could not start mail function The client was frustrated because he contacted two firms before contacting us, and both of these firms weren’t successful in resolving the problem. So, the first thing […]

An international news agency using Joomla to power one of their websites called us yesterday. They told us that they’re seeing a blank page, and the problem turned out to be related to sh404SEF’s cache (the cache file was exhausting all the memory that the system has and throwing this error). Due to the nature […]

One of Joomla’s biggest misconceptions is that if someone wants to make an article private (e.g. only allow access to that article for registered users), then all that needs to be done is to point a menu item to that article and change the Access value of that menu item to Registered and that’s it! […]

Note: This post is aimed at Joomla beginners – make that absolute Joomla beginners! We’ve been writing posts for extremely advanced Joomla developers for a long time now and we thought writing a post for absolute beginners would be the right thing to do on New Year’s Eve (Happy New Year, by the way)! We […]

A new client of ours has been using Joomla for a long time (since Joomla 1.5 was introduced), but has never, ever used Apache’s URL Rewriting. She has been using Joomla’s SEF all the time, but she never enabled the Use URL Rewriting feature. She knew that enabling URL rewriting can boost the search engine […]

We’re not big fans of the #__assets table, but you probably know this already if you’re one of our loyal readers! The #__assets table makes everything on the website slower, and not to mention that minor data integrity issues on that table can lead to large problems on the Joomla website. But let’s focus in […]

Note: The second solution presented in this post is a core change. Keep in mind that if you change the core of your Joomla website, you may need to re-apply your changes after a Joomla update. Also keep in mind that this particular core change may compromise the stability of your website (especially if your […]

“Joomla’s caching will come back to haunt you.” – itoctopus, Joomla experts, circa 2014 Note: The solution to this problem requires a modification to a core file, which means that future Joomla updates will wipe out the solution. Be careful and vigilant when you update your website if you have modified core files. One of […]

Note: Please read the whole post before taking any action. There is some important information at the end. If you check your Joomla site’s MySQL slow query log occasionally, you will notice that it is full of queries there are related to the #__session table (INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs). This is because Joomla updates the #__session […]