phpMyAdmin

  • Adding a new Joomla Super Administrator via phpMyAdmin

    Sometimes the Joomla site owners get a bit paranoic after a time, due to lot of hype about site security. Basically is nothing wrong with, a good site security is based on keeping your accounts secure. But what about when you are hired to do something in a Joomla site and you got ALL access (including FTP and database access) but you discover, that the Joomla account you received is only an Administrator. You can do a lot as an Administrator - but often not enough! Don't tell me, that this never happened to you - unless you are a Joomla rookie. What you can do?

  • Akeeba Backup

    Generally, backup is something you need to breathe, not just use, if you are in this business. It's the number one security tool. Having a fresh and usable backup can be a life saver in a number of situations, not only when your site is hacked, but on a great number of other situation, beginning from human error (accidentally deleted key parts of site - or just forgot to pay your hosting bill) to situations out of your control, as a hardware/software failure. And is essential to have an easy to use tool to move your site around - from local development environment to live hosting, or from one server to another. Enter Akeeba Backup (former Joomla Pack), a must have tool for any Joomla webmaster.

  • Change the default Joomla database prefix

    Every hacker in this world knows, that by default all Joomla database tables have the "jos_" prefix. Is that well known, than even automated defacing scripts are using this, and there are a lot of "tools" which are capable to automatically probing your site having this presumption built into them.

  • Change your database password while having no downtime

    Changing your database password is something you rarely need, but then you need it immediately, and with the lowest possible downtime. Why you should do that, in first time? Hm, there are many reasons/situations when you should consider changing your database access data ASAP:

    • You just got hacked
    • You have decided to end the business with your current developer, and you aren't sure that he's a trustable person
    • You have a good habit of changing all your passwords regularly
  • 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.

  • Did you upgraded to Joomla 1.0.13 and now you can't login?

    Do you are an early adopter and you upgraded to Joomla 1.0.13? And you have Community Builder, VirtueMart or SMF Bridge...and you cant' login right now, and/or your users are complaining about the same problem. We're sorry for you... Do you have a backup? Then is simple, restore the Joomla 1.0.12 files, overwriting the actual files with those from the official distribution package and restore the jos_users or similar (or at least the passwords column from that).

    Do you have backup, don't you? No??? Ouch... humm, then the job is a bit harder, but can be done!

    So, still you can do the file restore? Good, do it. Then read below!

  • 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.
  • Lost admin password - reloaded

    Did you manage to lost your password? Worst, maybe you lost the Super Administrator password? And for some reason you can't use the retrieve lost password functionality of Joomla...  If you use Joomla, if you forget your password you could just simply click on the "Forgot password" menu, and the new password will be sent to your email address. But what if you can't remember the exact e-mail address, or you have a local, development version and did not have the mailer handy... or your Internet connection is down? Or, worse - happened to me couple of times - you need to overtake a site originally developed by someone else?

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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
  • Save failing when adding new tag in Joomla 3.0

    Did you ever get this annoying error?

    Save failed with the following error: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1 SQL=INSERT INTO ***_contentitem_tag_map

  • Special quantity options for a VirtueMart Shopper Group

    A seemingly simple question caused serious headaches in past weeks. One of my clients who has an already seriously cross-hacked VirtueMart shop (SkinRich) asked me to make it possible, that a specific shopper group she had, the Distributors, namely, to be able to order products only in six-packs, making warehouse people's life much easier, and costs lower. The other users should have the default quantity options.

    After thinking a lot about how to solve the problem, I came out with a 4 line simple hack, which works perfectly for me.

  • 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:

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

    After year of using myself the tip You Do Not Have Access to the Administrator Section of This Site successfully today I hit the wall.

    I did one more stunt as the ones described above - but didn't helped.

    But let's see first the failed hack - because that\s interesting too: