This past Friday, we had a customer calling in and telling us that he just integrated Disqus (the famous commenting platform) on his Joomla website, but for some reason, every time someone makes a comment on one page, it appears on all the other pages. In other words, all the Disqus comments for that website […]

We got a call yesterday (well, technically, this morning) around 1:30 AM after midnight, it was a new client telling us that his Joomla website is completely messed up. He told us that all the modules are displaying on all the pages. We checked his website and we saw the problem: all published modules were […]

We get constant calls from Joomla administrators telling us that their Media Manager page (the one accessible from the backend by going to Content -> Media Manager) takes an awfully long time to fully load. We then ask them, “how many images do you have under the main images folder?”, and the answer ranges from […]

We constantly get clients who tell us that their website crashed after they have updated it. “And what did you update exactly?”, we ask them, and they reply that they have updated everything! And that’s the cause of the problem! Updating a Joomla website should never be done in one shot. The first thing that […]

Everyone talks about the benefits of using gzip on Joomla sites (you can enable it by logging in to the backend and going to Site -> Global Configuration -> Server, and then choosing “Yes” next to Gzip Page Compression), but nobody tells you the whole story. The whole story is that gzip, in general, only […]

Note: This post contains a core modification, which means that the next Joomla update may overwrite it. Another note: This post only applies to Joomla 2.5. The below will not work on Joomla 3.x. According to our customers, one of the most annoying features in Joomla is the checkout feature. Yes, this feature does the […]

Note: Make sure you backup your Joomla website before following the guide below. You should backup both the filesystem and the database. We are lately getting many Joomla 2.5.x websites with modified core to update to the latest version of Joomla. Obviously, this is a very delicate task because a Joomla update can (and most […]

We get a couple of call every week or so from new clients telling us that their Joomla website got penalized by Google. The first question that we ask them is: “Are you sure you got penalized?”, and the second question is: “How did you know you got penalized?”. The answer to the first question […]

We had a call earlier this week from a client telling us that whenever he tries to edit his Gantry template from Joomla’s backend, he gets a blank page. Hmmm! We tried to edit the Gantry template ourselves but we also got the blank page… Of course, there are many, many reasons that cause the […]

A new client called us today and told us that his Joomla website was penalized by Google. The client told us that his Joomla website slowly lost its rankings over the past few months, until it got penalized. We did a very quick investigation and we discovered that ever since Joomla 3.1 was out, our […]

Note: Before starting, we would like to explain what we mean by “files” in the title of this post. By files, we mean media files (such as images, videos, mp3s, etc…) and documents (such as PDF files and Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents, etc…). Another note: This post assumes that no file is linked to directly from outside […]

Using caching in Joomla will come back to haunt you. (Source: the team at itoctopus!) If you are using caching on your website, and we’re not even talking about page level caching, just global caching, you might have experienced some broken functionality here and there. Even if you haven’t noticed anything wrong on your website, […]

Let us start this post by explaining, in very concise terms, what is W3C compliance: W3C compliance is ensuring that the page has no HTML errors according to the W3C standards. W3C compliance has several benefits: It’s good for SEO: It is well known that Google, as well as other search engines, consider websites that […]

We love RSForm – it is by far the best form builder out there. We think that Joomla is blessed to have RSForm in the JED. One of the nicest things about RSForm is that it’s very flexible: there’s always a solution to whatever you want done, regardless of the complexity. OK – enough flirting! […]

Many Joomla administrators know how to hide hit tracking on a Joomla article – they can do this simply by clicking on the article title in the Article Manager, and then clicking on Options button on the top right, and then setting the value of Show Hits to Hide. Setting this value will automatically hide […]

On some occasions, you may wish to redirect specific users to specific pages when they login to your website. For example, if a user hasn’t logged in for a long time, then, you may want to redirect him to a specific page where he can see the latest additions to your website. Another example would […]

Ask any programmer what kind of work he dreads (and dislikes) most, and he’ll invariably answer you: “It has to be manual data entry”. Since we are programmers, then that answer applies to us as well. But hey, life isn’t always about doing the things that you love, sometimes, you’ll need to do things that […]

One of our clients, for whom we have just migrated a Joomla website for her small business, called us today and told us that she wanted to know how to add a new menu item to the Main Menu to point to a new article she has just created. We emailed her (while still on […]

There are some Joomla websites that have a file called error_log in their root directory (e.g. directly under public_html). For some websites, the error_log file is a several hundred megabytes in size and it grows by a few megabytes everyday. So what is this file and is it necessary to have it? Let’s start with […]

While optimizing a large Joomla website this morning (the website had around 100,000 pages), we noticed that the website was considerably slower for logged-in users than for the general public. Most pages, on that particular website, were loading (after our optimization) in 0.2 to 0.3 seconds for visitors, but these same pages were taking nearly […]

If there is any non-core section of your Joomla website that is critical to its performance, it must be the template. Your Joomla template is loaded on every single page that is served to your visitors, which means that any performance issue on your template will negatively affect your visitors’ experience on your website. Here […]

A client called us today and told us that even though his website is loading properly, he’s noticing that the “Transferring Data…” message at the bottom left of Firefox is taking forever to disappear, as if Firefox hasn’t finished loading the page (when, again, the page is fully loaded). We knew immediately what the issue […]

Joomla websites are typically not used as blogs. However, it is very common for a Joomla website to have a blog. That blog is usually a Joomla category blog (some websites use the WordPress extension, but we don’t recommend it, since you’ll be maintaining 2 websites instead of one). Of course, once a Joomla website […]

Yes, it’s a very long title, but we couldn’t think of one that is more descriptive. Obviously, there’s a story to this, so relax, and let us tell you a bedtime story (it’s 11:31 PM here in Montreal). A client called us around 9 PM (about 2 hours ago), and told us that all of […]

Yes – we know – the title of this post is a bit weird. 20 tips to lose traffic? Well, we figured, if we explain what happens when things are done the wrong way then we’ll create a sense of awareness that’ll help many Joomla administrators to do things the right way, which is a […]

One of the things that Joomla sites must have (by default), and currently don’t, is RSS syndication. RSS syndication allows your content to be syndicated across the web, which means better exposure, which in turn means more traffic. We have no idea why Joomla doesn’t have this as a built-in functionality, and we’re almost sure […]

A major annoyance on a Joomla website (and on any other website, for that matter) is browser caching. Browser caching, in this day and age, is mainly about caching images, JavaScript files, and CSS files on the client’s end. Now, while browser caching significantly decreases the load time of a page on the client’s end […]

While working on a Swiss website today, we noticed that every time we clicked on the HTML button in TinymCE, the browser tried to download source_editor.htm (which is a TinyMCE file). At first, we thought that there was a problem with the browser, so we tried another one but we had the exact same problem. […]

One of the companies that we regularly do work for complained about a sudden slowness issue with their Joomla website. They said that their Joomla websites was taking about half a minute to load. So, we tested the website, and it was taking exactly 30 seconds to load – and that was on each attempt. […]

If you’re using JCE (which is, by far, the best rich text editor in Joomla) you might have run into an issue where, when you insert an iframe into the body of the article and then you click on “Save”, the iframe disappears. In fact, this is default behavior so nearly everyone who’s using JCE […]

If you perform a search on your regular Joomla website, you will notice that the search results will only display a maximum of 50 matches, even though you might have more. So, why is that and how to fix it? To answer the “why” part of the question, Joomla is a heavy CMS, and, obviously, […]

We love K2 (we actually said that before) and we think that it’s a better content manager than Joomla’s own content manager. In fact, we are increasingly helping companies migrating the content of their Joomla websites from Joomla to K2. However, there are always little issues with K2, which is perfectly acceptable considering its huge […]

Yesterday (yes – we work on Sundays!), we were moving a Joomla website hosted on a Plesk version 9 server to a Plesk version 11 server – the transfer was pretty smooth, except that when we tested the website on the new server, we got a blank page. Restarting Apache didn’t solve the problem (although […]

One of our clients called us today and told us that the captcha below JComments comments is not working properly. She said that it works on page load, but once she hits the refresh button below the captcha, the captcha image disappears. Hmmm! We did a long investigation and we finally discovered that the reason […]

A company that we deal with runs a very large Joomla website mainly discussing law topics. The company complained that Joomla’s search doesn’t address a very common human issue: spelling mistakes. For example, if you are trying to search for Lawyer and you searched for Lauyer, then you won’t find anything using Joomla’s search, this […]

A couple of days ago we were working a skeleton template that is used to display some articles in lightbox popups. The template was very straightforward and had a few lines of code and had only one module position. We created the xml manifest file and then we packaged the template into a zip file […]

About a week ago, one of our clients was seeing an Internal Server Error when he was trying to upload an image with a quote through the media manager. That was weird, we thought… So, we changed error reporting to maximum and we still saw the same, ambiguous, Internal Server Error – clearly something that […]

A consulting company that subcontracts work to us sent us a quick task late at night yesterday. Everytime they create a module on a particular website, the module’s content is encapsulated in the following div: <div class=”moduletable”>Module Content</div> The encapsulating div is causing problems in the layout and they want to remove it. Now, if […]

If you have been running a Joomla website for some time, you would have noticed the presence of a parameter called ItemId in your Joomla URLs. Curiously, the ItemId has nothing to do with the id of the article being displayed – so what is it and why is it there? The ItemId is the […]

If you have been working on Joomla websites for a long time now, you might have run into the situation where you needed to search for an article by ID instead of its title. This is an extremely easy task if you have access to phpMyAdmin (you just need to login to phpMyAdmin, and go […]

While optimizing a migrated Joomla website today, we noticed that one of the queries was taking an exceptionally long time. It was this one: SELECT a.id, CASE WHEN CHAR_LENGTH(a.alias) THEN CONCAT_WS(‘:’, a.id, a.alias) ELSE a.id END as slug, CASE WHEN CHAR_LENGTH(cc.alias) THEN CONCAT_WS(‘:’, cc.id, cc.alias) ELSE cc.id END as catslug FROM #__content AS a LEFT […]

If you’re reading this post, then this means that most likely you have reached a level, in Joomla, where you know that you can override the default layout of any view in any component by copying template files to the html directory of the template and then modifying these files. For example, if you want […]

When we develop custom Joomla components for our clients, a very common task that we do is that we call custom controller functions from a URL within a view. For example, just today, while working on a custom component that’ll allow people to post their press releases through the frontend of a Joomla website, we […]

Here’s a small Saturday niblet… While trying to uninstall a template from the Template Manager, we encountered the following error: Cannot delete last style of a template And, of course, we were not able to uninstall the template. Uninstalling the template was necessary for us because we wanted to re-install it as it had an […]

Warning: Implementing the fix in this post will reset all your ACL modifications. Additionally, it’ll remove all the associations between your users and your groups – with the exception of the user with the first ID in the #__users table. It’ll also remove all the groups that you have created. If you have a large […]

Note: This post is targeted at Joomla developers. We were seeing the following error while trying to save the data in a Joomla form that we have created in the admin: Save failed with the following error: (with the colon at the end) The above tells us that there is a problem with saving the […]

Note: This post expects the reader to be a Joomla developer. If you’re a casual Joomla user with no programming experience then most likely this post is not for you. Sometimes, you search the web for a solution to something in Joomla and all you find is: Outdated information Code that doesn’t work Code that […]

Joomla is great when it comes to facilitating things for developers. For example, if you want to create a form that saves and retrieves data from the database in the backend, all you need to do is to create the XML schema file and create some standard files (these files are merely copy and paste […]

Many of our clients are large companies that choose to host their websites in-house. They do this because of security and data confidentiality concerns. This is standard practice in large companies but it usually suffers from the following drawbacks: In most cases, the in-house data center infrastructure is not at par with standard hosting infrastructures. […]

Nearly a month ago, we discussed how to quickly move a Joomla website from development to production. The process that we described in that post always worked for us – until yesterday. Here’s what we did: We created a fresh Joomla instance under a sub-directory called v2. We migrated the old content and we ensured […]