One of our clients asked to add a shortcut icon to K2 in the top menu. As some might know, there’s a Joomla module that already does that, so we just downloaded that module and installed it and that was it! But we thought, what if such a module didn’t exist, or what if a […]

Very early in the morning today, one of our regular customers came to us and told us that his website was down because of a “missing field” in the jos_content (of course, jos_ was not his real prefix) table. We checked his website and we were greeted by an error complaining about an unknown column […]

A new client called us this afternoon and told us that he’s not able to save anything in the backend of his Joomla website. Articles, categories, menu items, modules, etc… are all not saving. He gave us his Joomla credentials, we logged in to his account, and we verified that he indeed had this problem: […]

While migrating a very old Joomla website to version 2.5, we ran into a compatibility issue between the default MooTools library that comes with Joomla 2.5 and a module (the module was mod_jxtc_k2contentwall, for those who really want to know). The module was expecting an older version of MooTools – but what it got was […]

A new customer approached us this evening with a problem that is very common on old Joomla versions, the annoying 404 error on the homepage. We thought, that’s odd, this is a very old problem, does it still exist on Joomla 3.0? It wasn’t surprising but it was just…odd! The first thing that we did […]

One of the common questions we get from our customers is: “Why is it that my Joomla website doesn’t get the traffic that it deserves?” We take a look at their websites and then we answer their question. After a while, we discovered that the reasons why a Joomla website doesn’t get the traffic it […]

One of our clients was having a blank page when he was logging in to the backend of his Joomla website and so he turned to us for help. We enabled error reporting and we saw the following two errors: Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /libraries/openid/Auth/OpenID/Consumer.php on line […]

Some websites don’t have that much content – but they do have a lot of users. Such websites include charity websites, political websites, and some subscription websites. For these websites, it makes more sense to re-create the website from scratch in Joomla 2.5 (instead of migrating from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 – which can […]

We are currently migrating a large Joomla website with many pages to Joomla 2.5. Nearly every page has (unoptimized) links to other pages that look like the following: index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=[n]&Itemid=[m] Although the link above is not that pretty, it’s valid and it works. However, it only works before migrating the website (it will stop working after […]

After upgrading K2 of a Joomla website for a major international news agency to the latest version, we encountered the following error when testing the website: Fatal error: Call to undefined method K2ModelItemlist::getCategoryChilds() in /modules/mod_jxtc_k2contentwall/mod_jxtc_k2contentwall.php on line 133 Obviously, the error states that a function that is currently used (called getCategoryChilds) no longer exists in […]

If you have visited the Global Configuration page on a Joomla 2.5 website, then you might have noticed that there are now 2 types of caching: Conservative caching Progressive caching We often get calls from our clients asking us what kind of caching to use – we immediately tell them that they should enable the […]

We are migrating many Joomla websites (from version 1.5.x to the latest 2.5 version) these days and a common problem that we see is that once we finish the migration, and we make the website live, the “Save” button (as well as many button in the Joomla menu) stops working. This is normal – and […]

One of the little used Joomla official extensions out there is the wrapper component. The wrapper component has a very simple job to do: it includes a page from another website (or even from your website) into a page on your Joomla website. For example (this is just an example – yes, we know it’s […]

Usually we write about a recurring Joomla problem immediately – but for some reason we didn’t write about this error before, although we have seen it so many times before. But this afternoon, we got a call from a system administrator at a Fortune 500 company (a well known company making computer processors) saying that […]

Note 1: Validating fields on dynamically duplicated forms is too complex to explain in one post – and that’s why it’s not included here. If you want help on this, then please contact us. Note 2: We are assuming that you do not wish to save the fields in the database – if this is […]

We’re currently migrating a large news website from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 – and we’re facing some weird issues during the migration. For example, while we were able to migrate the articles successfully, clicking on any link (pointing to an article) resulted in the following error: 500 – JHtml: :icon not supported. File not […]

One of the requirements on a project that we’re currently working on was to display PDF files on a Joomla website. This might seem very easy – except that the PDF document is stored in the database (instead of the filesystem) and must be displayed on a separate window and not inline. The process was […]

Nearly every day we get the following call from one of our client: “Hi – my Joomla website stopped working all of a sudden – I’m not even able to login to the backend! This is an emergency, can you help?” “Of course we can help!”, we answer, and even though we know the likely […]

A few members of our team at itoctopus are currently working on a highly dynamic eLearning Joomla website that has many components, and each of these component has several views. One of these components was unique in the sense that some of its views had a different layout when the item to be displayed had […]

Many of our clients use RSForm to dynamically generate forms on their Joomla websites. A client who was developing a form (using RSForm) very early in the morning today called us and asked us that he has a presentation this morning and he urgently needs to make a value in a dropdown box in his […]

Before we begin, we must stress that the “Undefined Index” message is a notice, and not an error – which means that it will not, by itself, stop your website from functioning, but its presence may be the indication of a serious problem, for example: menu not appearing, form not working, site not displaying information […]

This morning we worked on a bizarre project that was a very welcome challenge to our Joomla skills! The project was not hard: it consisted of modifying a custom made extension on a Norwegian healthcare website, and it was supposed to take us a maximum of 30 minutes, but instead, it took us the whole […]

Note: We know that this Joomla error has been covered in other places before – but in many cases, the solutions presented elsewhere do not solve the problem and none of the other places explains why this problem happens in the first place. We will try our best to present an actual solution that will […]

One of our clients was trying to install an extension today (it was VirtueMart), and she told us that every time she tried to install that extension, she got a “No Data Received” error on Google Chrome. So we checked the problem ourselves, and sure enough, we had the same error. So we tried on […]

We are now recommending all our clients to migrate to Joomla 2.5. When we explain how hard it is to do this migration, we usually get one of the following answers: Tell us again, why should we migrate to Joomla 2.5? or Do we really need to migrate to Joomla 2.5? or Can’t we just […]

Let’s say that you are building a form in Joomla, but you need one of your fields to be an HTML text editor instead of a normal textarea, how do yo do that? Well, it’s very simple in Joomla – if you’re building the form using MVC (Model-View-Controller), and you want to add a field […]

Yesterday we had a client that told us that he was unable to login to his Joomla website. He told us that everytime he tries to login, he gets redirected back to the login page with no error! Since he was a technical person, he told us that he did a research on the subject […]

Setting the timezone is one of the trickiest things to do on any website, and while Joomla makes this easy for its users, it can still be very tricky. Let us explain why… Joomla allows the super administrator to change the website’s timezone in the configuration settings, by going to Site->Global Configuration->Server, and then changing […]

We have explained How to unlock a Joomla article before – and many of our clients and our readers benefited from our post – since we explained several ways on how to unlock any locked content on Joomla, whether it’s an article, a menu item, or a module. However, we got a question from one […]

We have discussed the Content Password plugin previously in a post explaining how to password protect a page in Joomla. Many of our readers have used it and have praised it. One of our customers, however, told us that he was seeing an “Internal Server Error” message when he uses this plugin on some of […]

At itoctopus, we like to share our knowledge with our readers. We’re one of the very few Joomla Consulting companies who are not afraid to do so for fear of educating competition or losing potential revenue. We would like, in this post, to share the secrets of debugging Joomla, the way we do it! Yes, […]

We think that the title of this article should be “Where Is My Content Stored in Joomla?” instead of “Where Are My Articles stored” in Joomla, but since most Joomla administrators treat all the content on a particular page as a single article, we opted for the latter title, but the former title is technically […]

We all know that from a search engine perspective, words surrounded by the H1 tags are the ultimate keywords. Apparently, those who developed Joomla do not know this (yes – we are criticizing them!). That’s why they have elected to surround the titles of the articles with H2 tags, making them less important and diluting […]

You have created a new article and you want to display the title of that article inline – in other words, you don’t want Joomla to display the title of the article, but rather you want to add the title of the article yourself to the content area using the H1 tags. (Joomla, by default, […]

We worked lately on a very exciting project. The project consisted of integrating eFront, the well known Learning Management System (or LMS), with Joomla, the very famous Content Management System (CMS). In short our client wanted to do the following: Ensure that the users tables are synchronized, where Joomla is the master and eFront is […]

You’ve probably been there before: You notice something wrong on your Joomla website. (for example, a typo) You’re sure how to fix it. You search the database to see if the problem is there. You don’t find the problem there, so you’re now sure that the problem resides in the filesystem. A quick way to […]

Nearly every day, we have one or two clients calling us and telling us that they can’t login to the backend of their Joomla website. Usually, their problem is one of the following: They are seeing a completely blank page when they try to login to their Joomla website. In other words, they see the […]

Nearly every other day we get a request from a customer to “fix PayPal” on his website. Usually the problem is one of the following: The customer adds a PayPal button to his Joomla website, but the PayPal button does not show up on the website. The customer adds a PayPal button to his Joomla […]

There are several components that are highly complex, and JomSocial is definitely one of them. That’s why when our clients see that they have a problem on it, they don’t bother resolving it themselves, mainly because they know it’s going to be very complicated, and that it may take them days before they can find […]

This post discusses the issue of domain blacklisting when it comes to email. We’ve all been there: we send an email to one of our clients, we don’t get a response. We re-send the email, and we still don’t get a response. The same happens when sending an email to another client. At one point, […]

We were asked to do a very challenging task by one of our clients: He wanted to get the number of Facebook “likes” his website has on every page. Of course, this can be determined by simply placing a Facebook “Like” button on every page (using a simple content plugin), but our client wanted to […]

Sometimes you decide to upgrade your version of Joomla, and then after the upgrade is done, your website becomes completely unusable or some of its features become broken. Why does that happen, and how to revert back to a previous version of Joomla to undo the upgrade. Why a Joomla upgrade might break your website […]

Your Joomla website works perfectly on Firefox and Chrome – yet, for some reason, your website has at least one JavaScript warning on IE, which makes your website sound as if it’s unprofessional and/or insecure. This will most likely lower your conversions on your website. The reason of having a JavaScript error on Internet Explorer, […]

If you haven’t seen the error “Could Not Find an XML Setup File in the Package” when working on your Joomla website then most likely you have only used the basic features of Joomla (which means that you have not taken advantage of Joomla’s extensive extensions’ library), this is because this error exclusively shows up […]

We have lately developed a solution for one of our clients, whereby if one customer purchases anything from his (our client’s) Joomla website using PayPal, a new Joomla account for that person is automatically created based on the person’s name and email address entered in PayPal. Additionally, the person receives a notification email (to his […]

For one reason or the other, you might decide to remove the www part from the URLs of your Joomla website. It might be that you have a short domain and you may want to emphasize the shortness of the domain even more, or it might be that you just don’t like seeing www in […]

One of our clients Joomla website had weird error today. When going to http://www.ourclientjoomlawebsite.com/administrator, our client was getting redirected to the homepage. We thought the work was easy because it wasn’t the first time we have seen this problem, it was actually the second time. The first time we saw this problem (where our client’s […]

Split testing is probably one of the best tools that website owners/marketing managers can use to improve conversion rates from their sites. In this post, we will explain what split testing is (while highlighting its benefits) and how to use it on your Joomla website. What is split testing? Split testing (also called A/B testing) […]

You might have seen the “Error Reporting” field in your Joomla Configuration Settings, and you might have wondered what it is. In short, the “Error Reporting” field is responsible for controlling the display of errors on your Joomla website. In this post, we’ll discuss what should be the default error reporting on your website, when […]

One of our clients wanted to display a Flash intro on her Joomla website. She had the Flash intro but she didn’t know how to add it to the website – she wanted her visitors to first see the Flash intro and then get redirected to the actual Joomla website either automatically or by clicking […]