MySQL

  • 500 Internal Error when saving an article - reloaded

    After solving couple of times the "500 Internal Server Error" problem as described in a previous post, I received another complaint from one of my clients I host:

    "I also cannot save the articles and here is the error I got
    500 - An error has occurred!"

    Easy cake - I was thinking, but after checking his account, discovered, that all settings described on that article (namely the collation settings in database) where correct.

  • Articles missing after exporting from a Joomla 3 database and reimporting them in Joomla 4

    Recently during a lenghtly upgrading process of an old Joomla 3 site to Joomla 4 I have run into an unusual issue. During the process of rebuilding/rebranding the site a large number of articles where added to the original site, and obviously they are missing from the new site. I imported articles directly in the database into the #__content table like I often did in Joomla 3 - a smooth process generally. However even the database looked ok, the new articles in Joomla 4 they were not visible.

  • Can't log in with admin, no error messages

    This error comes back time-to-time, especially after a Joomla site is moved from one server to another. The symptoms are simple - but frightening. You try to login to the administrator interface as usual, with your well known credentials, and the login box is reloading whitouth any kind of error message and withouth letting you in. No errors in browser console, no error in the logs, and no errors even if you turn the error reporting to maximum or the Joomla debug on. You can try even the tricks described elsewhere in this site to change your admin password - that won't help.

    Why? Because the cause(s) - yeah, there can be multiple causes - are different from having bad credentials! Let's see what you can do about!

    ATTENTION: these tricks are qualified as core hacks, so be careful: backup, wear your lucky hat, keep your finger crossed - and take any other security measures before you proceed - you can ruin your site easily with a wrong move.

  • Column 'checked_out' cannot be null

    After upgrading from Joomla 3.* to Joomla 4.* you can have this error in various places:

    Column 'checked_out' cannot be null
  • Create your next Joomla site locally with Ampps

    Like the majority of web developers I develop my websites and services locally before Ipublish them on the Internet. This makes sense in a variety of ways, from saving a lot of bandwidth to faster updating or improved security.

  • Enhance your security with .htaccess rules

    One of often overlooked security (and not only) resource for any Joomla site is under your fingertips! With each Joomla install (even from the old Mambo days) you have a file named htaccess.txt in your site's root directory. In most cases is never touched, and left as is - most weekend webmasters don't even know what is for. A few are using it to help Joomla or the specialized SEF URL builders to make those pretty SEF URL's for their site. And that's pretty easy - in most cases it's enough to rename it to .htaccess, and you are set. But there is much more power hidden there...

  • Full Path Disclosure

    Full Path Disclosure (FPD) vulnerabilities enable the attacker to see the path to the webroot/file. e.g.: /home/omg/htdocs/file/. Certain vulnerabilities, such as using the load_file() (within a SQL Injection ) query to view the page source, require the attacker to have the full path to the file they wish to view. Then the attacker can use this info to perform other type of attacks based on the obtained information.

  • How do you change the password for your Joomla database

    This is a two step process, and here I'm assuming that you are clever enough and you are hosting with a company that offers cPanel Wink. On other hosting environments the process might be slightly different, but the basics are the same.

  • How to install Joomla to GoDaddy

    Even if hosting Joomla on GoDaddy can be challenging, and anybody ever built a site on their servers will tell you to turn to some better Joomla host, many people still choose them because of the excellent price/offering ratio. Here are a few tips that will help you get Joomla running on GoDaddy with minimum fuss.

  • JA K2 Filter - error 1062 when saving existing items

    JA's K2 Search and Filter add-on is a nice - and powerful tool. But has an annoying problem (at least in version 1.0.7): When one edit a K2 item which have extra fields, on save an ugly error 1062 database error is popping up. The component is working correctly, the modified date is saved, but the user  doing the update gets seriously confused.

  • Joomla and Windows file permissions

    As I said elsewhere on the site one of key issues of running Joomla on a Windows server is to understand and apply correctly the Windows files and folders permissioning system to your Joomla install. Instead of writing my own compilation of how-tos, I reproduce here the excellent tutorial written by Russell Winter on the Joomla tutorials site. All kudos are going to him!


    For those of you that are either developing or delivering your Joomla! Web-Sites from the Windows environment, it is sometimes difficult to obtain relevant information regarding permissions. Unfortunately, it is a fact that most Web-Serving is offered under Unix and that Unix is pretty well documented within this environment. Hopefully the following information will go some way to clearing up any confusion and provide a little guidance.

  • Joomla display a blank page containing "Error" string

    ... and does this randomly, both in frontend and backend, sometimes showing the correct pages, and rarely an error message saying, that "table '#__session' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed".

  • jtablesession::Store Failed - DB function failed with error number 1062

    It is an error which drive me crazy couple of times. It's easy to fix - but hard to detect why happening. I didn't see any good explanation which fits to each single situation I needed to handle it. There are couple of popular theories on what causes the "jtablesession::Store Failed - DB function failed with error" type of errors, but sincerely  I can not confirm any of them:

    • Flooding (Check your http access logs for access IP’s, and your PHP error logs). Solution: Try dropping the time out down temporally to a lower value, to see if the sessions clear or not.
    • SEF If your site has a lot of visitors table jos_session can accumulate substantial overhead. And if you use default SEF, some 404 pages can make some bots to enter into loop, and those bots gives you a huge session overhead.
    • Site statistics from within Joomla. Enabling statistics through your site configuration just adds extra MySQL queries and increases server loads.
  • MAX_JOIN_SIZE problems

    Recently in more (usually cheap) hosts more of my clients reported a strange error, wich showed up recently, withouth notice.

    The error message is like this:

    1104 The SELECT would examine more than MAX_JOIN_SIZE rows; check your WHERE and use SET SQL_BIG_SELECTS=1 or SET SQL_MAX_JOIN_SIZE=# if the SELECT is okay

    followed by the failing query.

  • Menu items keep reordering after migration

    Recently - once again - I faced a very annoying problem: after migrating a Joomla site from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.7 - and later to Joomla 2.5 - time-to-time the menu ordering switched back to the essentially wrong ordering resulted from migration process. First time I thought I am doing something wrong, and when my client cried about, I reordered a menu again and again. I have to fight with this problem too many times until I found the source of error and an easy fix.

  • Multilanguage Joomla and UTF-8

    Joomla supports out of the box the UTF-8 character encoding, so someone building a multilingual website should not have any problems using UTF-8 character encoding in his site. Right?

    Yes and no, the CORE Joomla is problem free as I write this, but some non-core add-ons, templates - and yes, your own, home-cooked code can produce garbled output. Let's see why, and how we can fix it!

  • My MySQL database does not support UTF-8! Do I have a problem?

    If you search for the title of this tip you will found lot of hits. Actually, my last search returned 6.6 millions of hits! Apparently lot of people are having with - or has fears on this subject. When I first published this tip, back in 2005, there was no such amount of answers/references, and I think, that this real flood of sites about this potential issue is not because lot of people would having problems, but because more and more people are getting into building interactive sites.

    So, do You have problems?

  • Other usual hacker tactics

    There are numerous other tactics that can be used to break into a computer system, and these usually involve discovering weaknesses or loopholes in the server software's defenses. When a programmer writes software that runs on a web server, he tries to make sure that the software cannot be abused - but it can be very difficult to foresee every eventuality; vandals and hackers are always pushing software to the limit and trying out operations which the software was not designed to handle, in an attempt to discover a way in.

  • 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.

  • Running Joomla on a Windows server

    Yeah, you may say that nothing coming out from that Redmond-based factory does not qualify as LAMP environment, and Joomla is built yo be used on LAMP servers, am I right? Yes... and no. Why not let them to play with the best CMS around Yell.

    So, what a Windows aficionado should know if wants to run Joomla on his favorite server?

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