We have explained a long time ago how to add an HTML Text Editor field to an extension in Joomla 2.5 – and we have stated that the method described in that post only works on Joomla 2.5. Back then, we thought that we’ll never have to do this on Joomla 1.5 – and we […]

At itoctopus, we pride ourselves that we often give real solutions to common problems when no one else does! This morning was no different. We have solved a common problem with sh404SEF that even the creators of that extension claimed that there is no solution for. Here’s the problem. Let’s say you choose to include […]

While migrating a Joomla website from 1.5 to 2.5, we had an interesting issue: after we migrated the content and activated sh404SEF, we noticed that the IDs of the articles were at the beginning of the URL, instead of its end. For example, instead of this link: http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/test-article-12345.html We had this link: http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/12345-test-article.html Quick Note: […]

One of our very large customers gave us a call last Friday and told us that a stat counter that they were using on one of their websites suddenly stopped working. That stat counter was very important for them, since it was used by their potential advertisers to know how much page impressions they will […]

We have already expressed that we are not very big fans of sh404SEF – we think that this extension does more harm than good for what it does. But, the fact of the matter is, there are thousands of Joomla websites using it, so, whether we like it or not, it’s part of Joomla’s ecosystem […]

Every single time we migrate a large Joomla website to Joomla 2.5, we have to optimize it. Not because the client asks to do it and not because we think it’s fun (or because we like gold-plating), but because we have to – elsewise the website would be crawling. But why is that? Well, let’s […]

Note: Please read this post, in full, before taking any action. The representative of a large company that has contracted us to maintain its array of Joomla websites contacted us today and told us that some of the company’s users were not able to login to the backend of one specific website. Since we were […]

A client emailed us this morning and told us that after his website was migrated to Joomla 2.5, he was seeing the below error whenever he tried to download an attachment in Mosets Tree: You are not authorized to access this attachment. So, we started debugging Mosets Tree in order to trace the source of […]

The main administrator of a very large Joomla website called us today and told us that they have the following problem: a few articles, while being listed under the right directory, have the wrong category selected (in the menu) when they are viewed individually. For example, Article A belongs to Category C, and when you […]

If you have tried to search for a very long sentence in Joomla, then most likely the only result that you got was the following: Search term must be a minimum of 3 characters and a maximum of 20 characters. If you really want people to search for long sentences on your website, then obviously […]

A client of us called us today and told us that her website was hacked – again! She reminded us politely that we have cleaned her old Joomla website nearly a week ago but her website got hacked again, even though she did migrate to Joomla 2.5 as we recommended her to do. That’s odd! […]

Note: This post assumes your server is powered by WHM/cPanel and that you have ssh access. If you’re using Plesk then you can still do the below with minor modifications. As usual, you can contact us for help. Warning: While we try our best to make our guides as easy as possible, we have to […]

Note: This post is extremely advanced. If you’re not a technical person then we suggest you email it to your developer so that he can implement the suggestions below. If you don’t have a developer you can call us and we’ll take care of the optimization of your Joomla website. We had a small debate […]

We love K2 – it’s one of those rare components that are a true a gem. Nevertheless, we do discover some quirks in the K2 engine from time to time. Today, we have discovered a problem with setting the Open Graph description meta tag. Here’s what happened this afternoon… In the HTML code of one […]

One of our clients asked us to install RokQuickCart on his Joomla website. For those of you who don’t know, RokQuickCart is a free Joomla component that is used for small stores with standard items (e.g. online stores selling books, subscriptions, etc…) The nice thing about this component is that it’s extremely easy to use […]

One of our customers complained to us today that his Joomla website was extremely slow. So, we used the MySQL slow query log to unveil the issue, and we discovered that the culprit was Mosets Tree. In particular, it was these two queries: SELECT l.*, c.cat_name, c.cat_id, u.username AS username, u.name AS owner, u.email AS […]

AllVideos is an excellent plugin that uses the JW player to display videos in different formats. It’s excellent and it usually works without a hitch. However, if you have been using it for a long time in different environments, you might have seen the following error: The video could not be loaded, either because the […]

One of the really annoying plugins that we have to constantly work with is the MultiThumb plugin (or the so-called BK-MultiThumb plugin). It is annoying because we always have to modify the core to make it work the way we want it to work. It is also poorly documented and is characterized by an erratic […]

A couple of hours ago, we got an urgent call from a client in the UK (it’s now 7:30 AM here in Montreal), the client was using JEvents (the well known Joomla event calendar extension) to display the events of his company. He told us that for some reason, all the events under some categories […]

A client emailed us late at night yesterday and told us that all of the pages on his Joomla website have a weird hash in the URL. He told us that he just noticed the problem and he needed it fixed immediately. So, we checked the website and it was something we haven’t seen before: […]

A well known client of us came to us yesterday evening and told us that he was getting a blank page when he saves the user’s data on a custom made component. We knew there was a fatal error somewhere so we set the “Error Reporting” to “Maximum” and we tried to save the profile, […]

This afternoon a new client called us and told us that he’s not able to login to the backend of his Joomla website. While we’ve seen his exact problem before (he wasn’t able to login and no error was displayed), we were not able to fix it using our standard techniques. So we spent literally […]

We have mentioned before that we are migrating a lot of websites from using Joomla’s core content to K2 because K2 is simply better (well, this is our opinion anyway). But, even though K2 provides all the tools to make the content migration an easy task, quite often, there are quirks here and there that […]

We have been working on Joomla websites for a long time – so long that we have reached a point that we know the common errors in nearly every Joomla feature. Below are the top common errors that Joomla administrators face when they’re using the Media Manager (we’re also explaining how to fix them): Unable […]

An old client of ours called us yesterday evening and told us that his website was extremely slow to load. Our first guess was that it was hacked, but it was not; his website was very clean. What could it be? We then thought, well, maybe he has some huge queries running in the background […]

One of the most exciting things about owning a Joomla website is that one can build an e-commerce website in a very short period. Imagine that, it takes just a few days for you to sell your own products/services online and benefit from that huge market! But, unfortunately, in the real world, it’s not always […]

Some of the very old websites that we migrate to Joomla 2.5 may show the following error on K2 or VirtueMart pages: JUser: :_load: Unable to load user with ID: 62 (Note that 62 might be another number, such as 42) The reason for the error is that the component is trying to load a […]

Many of the Joomla websites we work on have multithumb installed. Multithumb, in case you don’t know what it is, is a Joomla plugin that automatically converts images to thumbnails (or smaller images) so as not to break the layout of the page. In some cases, multithumb works perfectly, but in many cases, its settings […]

One of the projects we are currently working on is converting a website from using Joomla’s content to K2’s content. In other words, all the articles, categories, images, are migrated to K2 and the website must display all its content from K2. Additionally, all the modules that are using Joomla’s content must be modified to […]

Note 1: This post is targeted at system administrators with hands-on experience with MySQL. If you’re not a technical person, then please forward this post to your system administrator (you can always hire us if you don’t have one!). Note 2: You will need root access to your server’s shell to implement the instructions in […]

About 70% of the work we’re doing nowadays is migrating Joomla websites from version 1.5 to version 2.5. A common error that we get while migrating a template is the following: Fatal error: Cannot access protected property ContentViewArticle::$params We have seen the above error so many times so far that we now know the solution […]

Yes – we know – the title of this post couldn’t be more odd, but here’s the scenario: We were migrating a large website from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5. Nearly all of the content of the migrated website was created in K2 and the website was using sh404. The links on the old Joomla […]

You have probably seen the “Rebuild” button on the Menu Manager page on your Joomla website for some time, but most likely you haven’t pressed it – because you didn’t know what it is, and perhaps you thought: “Maybe it’s not such a good idea to press that button”. Well, we think you’re right! So, […]

We have so far resolved literally hundreds of cases where people were not able to login to their Joomla websites. Since our aim is to always make the life of a Joomla administrator as easy as possible, we have decided to list the top 10 reasons that result in the inability for one to login […]

One of our regular customers emailed us today and told us that the Media Manager on his Joomla website of his company is not working. He asked to take a look. We logged in to his website and we noticed that while the Media Manager page is loading properly, the upload functionality is not working. […]

We are currently finalizing the migration of a very large Joomla website at the moment (from 1.5 to 2.5). During the latest QA session, we discovered that the “Email this link to a friend” popup page (the page that pops up when you click on the email icon on any article) does not look properly […]

– Note 1: This post is about migrating modules’ data (such as settings, content, etc…) – it’s not about migrating the actual code. This post comes to help when you have lots of modules on your Joomla 1.5 website, and you don’t have time to manually migrate all the data for all these modules. – […]

We had a small task today where one of our clients told us that one of the pages on his Joomla website was taking a long time to load, and then eventually it was displaying a blank screen. We first thought that his website was hacked, but then, when we enabled error reporting, we saw […]

Quite often, we receive requests from our customers asking us to “fix” their SPF records on their Joomla websites. So, what is an SPF record, and why does a Joomla website need it? An SPF (SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework) record is a DNS entry that will tell other mail servers which IP (or […]

Note: This post assumes that you have migrated the K2 extension to the latest version on Joomla 1.5 prior to migrating to Joomla 2.5. We are currently working on a large, a very large migration project from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5. A mini-project in this migration project is migrating K2 content to the new […]

By default, the media manager in Joomla 2.5 allows a maximum upload size of 10 MB, which is ridiculous, since a high resolution picture can be bigger than 10 MB, and the smallest video with the smallest resolution (by today’s standards) can be at least 3 times that size. So, there must be a way […]

When working on a major project on a Joomla website, we usually maximize the Joomla error reporting. This guarantees that not a single error, not even a notice, can go undetected and unfixed in our final work. One of the common notices that we see on major projects is the following: Notice: Undefined property: [extension_name]::$_state […]

It was around 3 AM in the morning – we were working hard on a project to meet a deadline that was set for next week, but we were stuck. The project consisted of a migration of a Joomla website from version 1.5 to version 2.5 – something that we have done hundreds of times […]

OK – we know that the title of this post is long – in fact, it is way too long, but we couldn’t find a better title for this very specific issue, so we decided that the title should be the same as the error message. While working on a Joomla website for one our […]

We occasionally get contacted by customers who complain about the trashing process in Joomla; they say that they just cannot empty the trash. When we get one of these calls, we tell the customer: “Are you sure you are really emptying the trash?” The reason why we say that is that in 99% of the […]

Most of our clients want to track the performance of their Joomla website – and what better way to track that performance than with Google Analytics? Google Analytics provides the website owner with a wealth of information about his website: how many visitors the websites gets per day, where these visitors are coming from, and […]

Note: This post is targeted at absolute beginners in Joomla as we have noticed that the “global check-in not working” issue is extremely common for those who are very new to Joomla. We get regular calls from some of our customers who are very new to Joomla complaining that they cannot perform a global check-in […]

Warning: Mootools is a well known (and very stable) JavaScript library that is used to support many client-side activities on Joomla. Disabling it/removing it (or replacing it with another library) might cause a lot of instability on your Joomla website and may render your Joomla website (especially its backend) completely inoperable. Please proceed carefully and, […]

Note: This post only applies to Joomla 2.5. We got an email very early this morning from one of our regular customers. Here’s the email (minus, of course, our customer’s information): “Hi, I’m not able to reset my password. When I try to reset it using the password reminder tool I get the following error: […]

Yesterday we were working on the migration of a very old website. That website had a simple module that was programmed to display, on the website, whatever it had in the field JavaScript Code. As the name suggests, that field contained some JavaScript code. When we migrated the module to Joomla 2.5, we ran into […]