troubleshoot

• Multi-currency store: wrong currency on PayPal checkout

  VirtueMart is great when you want to set up a store which works with multiple currencies. You can set up your own prices for each currencies in your shop, or you can use one of available currency converters. The core functionality supports the use of European Central Bank's live currency rates, but there are plugins supporting other rates too.

  But you can run into trouble where you'd expect to not have any surprises: on PayPal checkout page.

• Never-ending database installation

  If you’ve been trying to install a quickstart package received after a template purchase, and the installation freezes at the database creation/restoration step you might have to make few changes in the server/PHP environment in order to fix the issue.

• No Input File Specified error on GoDaddy

  GoDaddy is notoriously buggy when comes to Joomla hosting. But when you turn on SEF, you might have another nasty surprise, instead of your site's pages you might see this:

  No Input File Specified
• PHP Warning: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings....

  With recent upgrade of a great number of servers to PHP 5.3.8 may clients reported that their site began to show error messages like

  Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings

  or

  Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings
• Problems geting SEF URL's work on 1&1-s servers

  Your Joomla site is hosted on 1&1? Great!... Or not so great? Yea, I know the feeling, I had that experience too. All worked just fine (almost) until I decided to kick in the SEF engine, and use the .htaccess redirect, as I suggested elsewhere. And the disaster stroked...

• Quickstart installation problems

  If you purchased a commercial Joomla template it is very likely that in the package you got you have a special installation package, called Quickstart which let you have the carbon copy of the template demo site in just couple of clicks. It is a gread bonus, helpful especially for beginners. but once in a while you might have problems by installing this package, especially if you try to install it on your local machine.

• reCaptcha stopped working

  While working on a new site I discovered, that reCaptcha - which used to be a rock solid part of the CMS since Joomla 1.7 - stopped working. Spent couple of hours googling around and checking and double-checking settings, just to discover, that Google, in his infinite wisdom, has changed things again without notice. The problem affects all Joomla versions from 1.7.1 to 3.2.0.

• Save Failed with the Following Error: Invalid Parent ID

  When I have seen first time this error on Joomla 1.6 while tried to save a new article in Article Manager I was lost:

  Save Failed with the Following Error: Invalid Parent ID
• Server Forbidden 500 error when saving in Joomla Admin backend

  I had been driven crazy recently by couple of my sites suddenly beginning to exhibit a very annoying behavior. Sites, which worked flawlessly over past months/years began to die when I tried to save something, from new or edited articles, modules, menu items, contacts.

  Of course the first thing I done was to look to the error logs, then to enable debug and set the error reporting level to maximum. Nothing helpful.

• The directory /components/libraries/cmslib/cache/ is filling up and is eating my server space!

  Today one of my clients asked me to find out why he is running out of available disk space, despite the fact that has an average Joomla 1.5 site with nothing extraordinary installed, and a generous 2 Gigs server space. In couple of minutes I found the first clue, the /components/libraries/cmslib/cache/ directory has a whopping 700 Megs plus worth of content consisting by outdated cache files. From there finding the culprit was easy - it's the Jom Comment component which is filling up the server space with unneeded cache files. The fix was promised sometime back in 2009, but seemingly was never implemented - at least not in the Joomla 1.5 versions.

  What you can do?

• The mail function has been temporarily disabled on this site

  After upgrade to Joomla 3.2 from previous Joomla 3.* versions you might see the above error message in the backend, or, worse, you simply don't receive any e-mail notifications you usually do. And the site worked just fine before the upgrade!!

  If you have registration enabled, or you use the site to interact with your visitors/customers the side effects can be really damaging - nobody gets any mails - and you evend don't see any notice about, until you began to dig for the causes, and, for example, try to send a message for yourself from backend. This potentially can roun your online business or community. Apparently everything is OK, all settings are correct, but the mails are simply not sent.

  What's the cause and, more important, how you can fix it?

• The most common Joomla SEO mistakes

  Mastering the Web is a never ending learning process. You can learn from both good and bad examples. Unfortunately most of us are learning from their own mistakes. A well known situation is that you got a brand new Joomla site, latest tricks, stunning design, appealing content, but you miss a key ingredient of the success: the Visitor. And you've wondering, why they aren't coming, despite your SEO efforts as sending out marketing e-mails to your closest 10.000 "friends" and spending nice money in buying incoming links and lots of postings on every imaginable social marketing site, blog and forum. It's not obvious, but the problem may be in what you did, and not in what you missed. Anyway, here's a mix of things usually Joomla webmasters are doing wrong. Learn from, and try to avoid these most common mistakes!

• This Site Is Temporarly Unavailable

  You may already seen this annoying message instead of your Joomla site:

  This site is temporarily unavailable.
  Please notify the System Administrator.

  And you are virtually clueless what to do about, and even the smallest bit of info on what happened can be a lifesaver.

• Unresponsive WYSIWYG editor

  The WYSIWYG editors are great additions to the Joomla, and we have lots of them around. They make a webmaster from casual user and can speed up the work of pros. But, sometimes, you find that you cannot enter text into the HTML editor, or click on the HTML editor's toolbar buttons - you are locked out of editing your content!

  What can be more annoying as being unable to edit your own site?

• White death screen on category blog page

  I was sure that ths is an error wich newer come back to me - was a relatively common one in early 2010-s, since dissappeared from my radar. Today one of my former students approached me with his problem. He took over a site running the latest Joomla, and when tried to change the blog list views to category blog views, as the siteowner requested, the respective pages ended up with a white PHP fatal error death screen.

• Why my Joomla site is this slow?

  Joomla generally is running at an acceptable speed -  users aren't seeing differences between an average Joomla site and another CMS'es. But what if they do? What can cause the (sometime unbearable) slowness of some Joomla sites?

• XML Parsing Error at. Error

  After moving a site to a new server I found this error in the backend - at least one error per page, but casually even more.

  XML Parsing Error at. Error

  No error number, no line number... What a heck!

• You are not authorised to view this resource

  Sometimes when you publish a new menu item, and everything seems to be OK, when you try to access the new menu item you just created you hit the wall: instead of the intended content you'll see the following error:

  You are not authorized to view this resource.
  You need to login.

  Even more confusing can be the situation when a link which used to work behaves this way. The target content item is published, access rights are set to Public, and you still got this message! What can be wrong here?

• You cannot access the private section of this site

  You just upgraded your Joomla site to latest Joomla 2.5 or 3.* and your regular, registered users cannot login to the frontend, seeing this error:

  "You cannot access the private section of this site"

• You Do Not Have Access to the Administrator Section of This Site

  It's annoying... your own Joomla site don't let you log in in the backend, and you see the above error message... What's happened?

  Humm, there are couple of things you can do. Contrary of the lots of "smart" blog entries on the subject out there (last search revealed about 2 million hits) in most of the cases, regardless to Joomla version the cause is simple: