While working on one of our clients’ website (her version of Joomla was 1.5.14, but we think that this problem applies to all 1.5.x versions where x is less than 20), we noticed that the Menu Item Manager in Joomla’s backend had 0 men items, although the menu items existed as they were appearing on […]
One of the first questions that our new customers ask us is: “What is Joomla’s ideal hosting environment?”. They usually ask us this question out of frustration with their current hosting provider: they have done everything they could to optimize their Joomla website – they have even followed our advices on how to make a […]
We were working on a very weird problem on a Joomla website this afternoon. The owner of the website told us that he wanted his website to be “offline”, so he went to Joomla’s configuration settings and set the “Site Offline” flag to “Yes”. He told us that even though he did that, his website […]
Please note that this post will only show you to remove Joomla’s default favicon from your website. Check this post on how to add a favicon to your Joomla website. Many Joomla websites still have the default Joomla’s favicon (favorite icon). Of course, they don’t have it by choice, they have it because Joomla, by […]
One of the common questions that we get from owners of advanced Joomla websites is how to assign articles to multiple categories in Joomla. Our immediate answer to this question is that by default, Joomla does not allow assignment of an article to multiple categories (or sections). The answer we typically receive is “Why”, and […]
Let’s say that you are creating an article called “Privacy Policy” on your Joomla website. You add the article to your website, and the article’s URL becomes like this (if you have SEF enabled): http://www.yourjoomlawebsite.com/uncategorized/privacy-policy As you can see, the name of the category, which is uncategorized, is automatically added to the URL of the […]
We often do Joomla installation for our clients – usually the process is really fast. We first upload the zip file to the server, we extract it there, we create the database, and then we point our browser to http://ourclientjoomlawebsite.com, and we follow the installation process! That’s it! The process was always smooth for all […]
On one Sunday afternoon, you might decide to spend a lot of time browsing your Joomla website, just to make sure that all the pages are working fine. 15 minutes later, you see the following error: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 5298178 bytes) What happened for you to […]
We got a call yesterday from a potential client telling us that he wants to create an E-Commerce website and he heard that he can easily do that with Joomla. He wanted to do the job by himself and so he asked us if we can explain for him the process from scratch. And so […]
Warning: This post is about removing content from your database, specifically your VirtueMart e-commerce/store tables. If this is not what you want then please stop reading now. itoctopus claims no responsibility (neither explicit nor implicit) whatsoever if you accidentally remove data that you later need. Before you begin you need to download a backup and […]
Yesterday, we worked on a website that was using Joomla 1.0.0. The owner of the website had three problems: Problem #1: The website was displaying “Your are not authorized to view this resource” on the homepage. Well, it wasn’t technically the homepage, as the website had a flash introduction that was redirecting to an article […]
We receive a call every other day from new clients telling us that one of their Joomla articles is not updating: They can see the updates in the backend, but the frontend does not show the updates. In most cases, there are three simple reasons behind this: The article is retrieved from the cache: When […]
A large percentage of our Joomla clients have their websites hosted with GoDaddy (GoDaddy is a very convenient hosting for many of our customers because this is where they bought their domains from), so we thought that writing a comprehensive and detailed post on how to manually install Joomla on a GoDaddy hosting would be […]
Let’s say that you own two Joomla websites, and you want to unify the login for these sites – in other words, whenever someone is logged in to one site, then you want him to be automatically logged in to the other. The process of unifying login across multiple is called “cookie migration”, and is […]
We just got a call from a new client. The client told us that he was suddenly seeing an error on every page of his Joomla website. The page still loads, but there is an error on every page that loads. It’s not the first time that we had such a call, and that’s why […]
Every week, we get about 2 requests from customers asking us to import their products’ database (in a CSV format) into VirtueMart on their Joomla website. Usually, every customer has the following 4 columns (fields) in his CSV file: Product Name Product Description Product Price Product Category The remaining columns differ based on the customer’s […]
We had a very interesting job today. A new client came to us, and told us that his Joomla website was not sending emails. We first thought that it was the settings that he had on his configuration, but everything was fine. His mail settings were correct, he was using “PHP Mailer” as Mailer and […]
We are currently working on a very interesting project. The project consists of a migration of a Joomla website to another sever, as well as several major fixes to the website. One of these “fixes” revolve around an RSForm Form, that doesn’t work. The form seems to submit, but then redirects back to itself (instead […]
Occasionally, one of our (potential) clients calls us and tells that he’s not able to edit the CSS file on his Joomla website. Usually, the client just wants to change a color or a font. Sometimes the client is not able to see the Template Manager section so he’s not even able to see the […]
Every other week or so, we get a call from a (potential) client that goes like this: Client: “Hi!” Us: “Hi!”https://www.itoctopus.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=1329&message=1 Client: “I would like to make some edits to my database, and I want to know which Joomla file is the database.” Us: “Well sir, the database is not stored in any Joomla file, […]
In this post, we will list the most important tips that you can use to have a safe, fast, and efficient Joomla website. The tips are grouped into 3 categories: Security tips Performance tips General tips Important security tips for Joomla We have discussed before 10 security tips for your Joomla website. We will re-discuss […]
We have explained before how you can move your Joomla website from one server to another. That post, with minor modification, can be used to duplicate your Joomla website. However, we are going to explain the whole process from scratch to make it easier for you, our readers/customers. In short, the process is: Download your […]
One of the worst things (SEO wise) that you can have on your Joomla website is duplicate content. Duplicate content will dilute the importance of your content by confusing search engines on which content to list in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). There are many causes for duplicate content to appear on your website: […]
Before discussing the topic in the title, we want to say that this is the hundredth post on our blog! Hooray! We took a decision last year to blog nearly 5 times a week about the technical issues that we face during our work on your websites, so that other people can learn from our […]
Sometimes you find a very beautiful Joomla template (no, not all Joomla websites are ugly), you download it, and then you install it. Once you try to install it, you will be faced with one of the six following scenarios: The template works and your website looks exactly as the demo image/website for the template. […]
Hotlinking is one of the most annoying problems on the Internet that website owners have to deal with. Hotlinking is when one website includes in one or more of its pages a reference to one or more of your images (or videos, or pdf documents, or music files, etc…). In other words, let’s say that […]
A couple of days ago a customer approached us with the following problem: His Joomla’s VirtueMart shop was displaying the category ID in the title of the page of each category details page. So, for example, instead of having something as “Cheap TVs” as the page title, his page title was “72-Cheap TVs”. Obviously, this […]
We have explained before on how to block a specific IP or range of IPs from accessing your Joomla website. Since we have published that article, we had many requests asking us on how to block a specific country from accessing a Joomla website. Now why would anyone want to block a whole country (or […]
You think that it’s time to enable caching, or you think that you want to rewrite your URLs, or you want to take your website temporarily offline, so you just change the configuration settings in your Joomla website, you click on Save on the top right, and you are greeted by the following error: An […]
Sometimes, especially if you’re on a slow connection or if your website is hosted overseas (with a slow host), the Joomla installation can take a long time, mainly because of the time it takes to upload several thousand files to your server (Both supported versions of Joomla: Joomla 1.5.25 and 1.7.3 have over 4,000 files […]
Every once in a while, we get a new (or an existing) customer asking us to migrate his osCommerce website to VirtueMart. Some of these customers already own a Joomla website and know how powerful it is and they know that VirtueMart is a reliable alternative for osCommerce (these customers usually run their osCommerce website […]
Quite often, we have customers coming to us and telling us that they have some images that are not appearing on their Joomla website. After investigation, it all comes down (mainly) to three reasons: Joomla SEF or an equivalent URL rewrite extension The short_open_tag directive in php.ini The asp_tag directive in php.ini Let us discuss […]
We had an interesting problem a few days ago. One of our customers was using VirtueMart to run his online store, and he had a security warning on his secure (https://) checkout page, claiming that his checkout page contained some secure and non-secure items. Here are the errors that our customer was experiencing: On Internet […]
We have talked before on when to clear your cache in Joomla, so probably you have read the article and thought that now is the best time to do it. So, you went ahead and disabled the cache, thinking that this will delete your cache. But your pages are still cached. Weird! You double check […]
If you have been using Joomla for a long time, then it might be that you have faced the dreaded “Invalid Token” when you try to login to the Joomla (on the real website, not the control panel), or when you try to perform other activities, such as voting, submitting forms, etc… In this post […]
One of the common and recurring problems that our clients have is when their Joomla website shows a 404 Error on the homepage (and it says something like Article #n not found). There are many causes for this error, including SEF installation/compatibility issues. However, the most common cause of this error is when the client […]
In a previous post, we explained how to create a super administrator user in Joomla. In that post, we also explained how to delete a super administrator, which can simply be done by going to the User Manager under Site, clicking on the checkbox next to the super administrator you wish to delete, and then […]
Several customers approached us at one time or the other with the following problem: When they try to add an item to the cart in VirtueMart (on their Joomla website), the add to cart doesn’t work (nothing will happen – the person remains on the same page). They also tell us the following information: The […]
Many of our customers ask us to disable right click on their Joomla website. As such, we have decided to write a post explaining how this is done. Before starting, you need to be aware of the following: Preventing right clicks will only deter non-technical visitors from stealing your content (such as text and images). […]
At least every other day, a customer contacts us and asks us the following question: “Why is my Joomla website so slow?” We reply to her/him that since Joomla is a very large and powerful CMS, it is somehow slow. However, it shouldn’t be very slow, and there are ways to make a Joomla website […]
You own a Joomla website, and you’re proud of it, but the thing is, Google still hasn’t indexed it, or Google has indexed only a few pages of your website. So, what do you do to fully index your Joomla website with Google and other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing? Before starting this […]
We frequently get requests from our customers asking us to check if their Joomla website is hacked, because they think it is behaving oddly. And so we do check the website, and in most cases, we discover that the website is actually hacked. So, the first sign that your website is hacked is if you […]
Our article, 10 reasons why your Joomla website got hacked, was well received by our readers (clients and visitors alike). In this post, we want to list the top 10 security tips to protect your Joomla website. Always keep your Joomla website up-to-date with the latest version of Joomla: Every Joomla update addresses security issues […]
Sometimes, you don’t want to show some or all of the article’s information (such as the creation date or the author name) in Joomla. This article will explain to you, in details, how to remove some or all of the article’s information from a specific article or from all articles. If you want to remove […]
If you’re reading this article because you want to reinstall Joomla, then check this article on how to reinstall Joomla. Sometimes you may wish to just uninstall Joomla from your server for one of the following reasons: You want to move your Joomla website to another server and you wish to remove all the information […]
Quite often, some site owners realize that the domain name they picked and used for their Joomla website doesn’t cut it anymore, so they decide to change it and move their Joomla website to another (better) domain. In this guide, we provide step-by-step instructions on how to do that: Step 1 – Move your Joomla […]
Sometimes you have an important page that you don’t want every visitor to your website to have access to. The first thing that comes to your mind is to make this page only accessible by members, but you then realize that you don’t want all your members to have access to this page. Just a […]
Sometimes, people experiment with some of their Joomla core files and/or with non-content tables in the Joomla database to the point that their websites become inoperable. The easy (well sometimes it’s not very easy) solution at this point is to reinstall Joomla from scratch. But how do you do that? Well, here are the steps […]
Many of our clients come to us and ask the following 2 questions: Is it legal to remove the “Powered by Joomla!” message in the footer? If it’s legal, then how can we remove it? To answer the first question, yes it’s perfectly legal to do so. However, it is not legal to remove the […]
In this article we are assuming that you have already purchased an SSL and you have installed it on your website, and all that is left for you to do is to enable it. If you need help purchasing and installing an SSL certificate on your Joomla website, then please contact us, we will definitely […]