plugin

  • 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.

  • Choose your extensions carefully

    Choose your extensions wisely - one basic rule when you develop a Joomla site. And same applies to you, weekend webmasters! Your site is a sitting duck, waiting for hackers (especially script kiddies. Well, easy to say it, but what can be seen as "wise" choice here?

  • Crashed article editor

    Today one of my clients called me with this problem:

    When I click article manager or category manager in order to edit an article or category, I see a page with no textarea, no buttons, no menus

    Was a weird call, and proven to be a difficult problem

  • Debugging a translation

    You just finished a development of a new component/module/plugin, which has multilanguage support, or just finished a translation of such a Joomla addon and want to doublecheck the result, and don't know how to do it? Don't look further, Joomla supports some useful debugging mechanisms that can make it easier to locate untranslated strings and diagnose problems with language translations in installed extensions.

  • Duplicate Template Fix for Joomla 2.5

    Since the release of Joomla 2.5 there has been a particularly annoying “duplicate template” bug that becomes clearly evident when you install or update a template. This has caused a great deal of confusion and consternation among Joomla users, but nobody offered an easy to use fix until recently. As anyone else in this business I hit the wall with this bug, until I found a cure for it on RocketTheme's blog.

  • Enhanced User Profiles in Joomla 1.7+

    One of the problems many users are facing when start they Joomla based site is, that the user information Joomla collects during registration is scarce - username and password often is not quite enough for their purposes. And the first reaction usually is to install a community solution, like Community Builder, JoomSocial or other, fancy user management tool - a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

  • Error: 500 - String could not be parsed as XML

    Today I had a big surprise, several of my sites went out of business with the "Error: 500 - String could not be parsed as XML" message. I checked everything, and found no clues what can be happened. the sites weren't hacked, files or database has no signs to being tampered width or being damaged.

    And usual bug-hunting tactics as unpublishing modules for example revealed also nothing.

  • Give a boost to your site's search speed

    When one needs something, usually want it fast' and with large, complex Joomla sites that may be a problem. Sometimes the search takes... okay, not forever, but long enough to think about how you can give it some extra speed. Here are some tips and tricks to accelerate Joomla search speed:

  • How to Create SEF URL's for ChronoForms with sh404SEF (or any other SEF component)

    The sh404SEF component is a terrific tool for creating and maintaining SEF URL's for your Joomla site - and to make it more Google - and user - friendly, with one condition: to have a SEF plugin for your components already delivered to you with the sh404SEF or to find one ready-made on the web.

    Luckily most of popular components are already covered by the component itself, or there are geeks on the net (like me) publishing the needed add-ons. One of notable exceptions is the popular form component, Chronoforms.

  • How to remove the Joomla generator tag - reloaded

    Why you should do that? Humm, there are arguments why yo should get rid off or keep it, but it's a matter of personal choice, mainly. The methods to removing the meta name generator tag for Joomla varies between versions. I discussed couple of ways to do it  in an earlier tip. Here is a new one, working in Joomla 2.5!

  • Insert a plugin (or a module) anywhere

    You might need to use a plugin's output in a component, or to insert a module in a page outputted by an arbitrary component. I mean ANY plugin which has it's own output in ANY Joomla component you like.

    I know, there are couple of ready-made solutions, but all of these are specific to a given component(s) and some components have their own plugins to do that.

  • Installer tabs missing after upgrade to Joomla 3.6

    After upgrading to Joomla 3.6 I had a nasty surprise - in the Joomla Installer the tabs - Install from file,  Install from folder etc.., all but the Install from Web - where all gone. Of course, nothing found on the web: this happens when you are an early adopter. But I discovered the "fix" accidentally, on my own.

  • Invalid Token, in store config - when try to upgrade VirtueMart

    Time-to-time I am hitting the wall with this, even with 100+ VM sites in my portfolio, and parts of VM core having my signature. Here are few tricks wich usually solves the problem.

  • Joomla Extensions

    One of frustrating questions for novice Joomlers is the question: What is the difference between a Joomla Component, a Module and a Plugin? This issue can seem rather confusing, but it is really worth understanding this, because this is a key issue in understanding, how Joomla works, and each of them have their specific role and way to set up and operate.

  • Just turned SEF on and inner page images where gone

    Did you had this experience? Couple of days ago I just turned on SEF and the inner pages began to act weird - images disappeared, modules misbehaved, scripts weren't loaded...

    My first reaction was that I have set something wrong... or the SEF component I used have a flaw. After few days of digging I found that the issue has a much simpler cause.

  • K2 items list sortable freely by custom fields

    Recently a customer of mine asked for a page with a list of K2 items, sortable by the custom fields and item titles. And I accepted the challenge. a first search on the "k2 list sort by extra fields" term returned a whopping number of 1,120,000+ results... and most of them where how to hack the core component to obtain a list sorted by a given extra field - which was not what I wanted. But, reading these pages an ideea sparkled - and in less, than a hour I had in place a solution wich was clean, no core code was hacked, and the table of results is freely sortable.

  • Mambot

    Mambots where the ancestors of current version Joomla plugins. Mambots were introduced in Mambo and offered possibilities to add plug-in logic to your site mainly for the purpose of manipulating content. As the smallest Joomla extensions, they where smaller or bigger chunks of code executed upon being triggered by specially formatted keywords/signal words inserted in the various places of a Joomla 1.0 site.

  • Modules In Content

    Modules are typically displayed on the left and right sides of the page... in module positions everywhere .Evil It's not uncommon to also find modules on the top or bottom of a page. The display location for a module is controlled by the site administrator through the Joomla administrator panel, and it's limited by the template's internal structure. Generally you can insert modules only in the pre-defined module positions. The module management screen provides several options as possible locations for a published module. But Joomla does not provide an easy way if you want to display these modules in the main content area of the site.

  • Moving the location of Admin login - reloaded

    In a previous tip where I described how you can made a Joomla site more secure by relocating the admin login page I presumed that anyone reading it is a code guru. But what if not? More and more webmasters today are casual Joomla users - and they deserve attention too!

  • Options

    YOnce the basic setup is done, yo need to tweak your Joomla installation to behave as you need. you will need individual configuration settings for your website elements (components, plugins, modules, content pages, templates): in the Joomla lingo we call them options. These options are applied to the whole website, for users, categories, modules, components. Since Joomla 1.6 this has became standard: you will always find an icon named Options in the backend pages, which are providing you the interface to set your preferences for the given component.

    For example in the Joomla 1.6+ in the template manager you have in the Options a way to switch on or off the support for the well known trick to append "?tp=1", which reveals you the available module positions for your templates.

    Now you can block attempts to visualize by others these module positions by visiting the address:

    http ://yourdomain.com/index.php?tp=1

    BTW: The "tp" stands for template position and the trick is one of core Joomla tricks.

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