The Apple Touch Icon Files and Joomla Performance
If you want to see something interesting, then do the following: ssh to the server hosting your Joomla website. Change to the domlogs folder. Run the following grep on the main log file of your domain:...
View Article5 Disadvantages of Using a Custom Made CMS Rather than Joomla
One of our non-regular Joomla clients revealed to us their wish to build their own CMS. They told us that the number one reason why they’re doing this is because maintaining a large Joomla website is...
View ArticleHow to Implement DFP Ad Targeting on Joomla Sites
Lately, we have been working increasingly on marketing (from a very technical perspective), specifically on ad targeting. Essentially, our clients are being pressured by their own clients to target...
View ArticleYour PHP Changes Are Not Showing on Your Joomla Website? Maybe It’s OPCache
Earlier today, we ran into a very weird issue… We were making some changes to a cron PHP file (under the cli folder), but our changes were not taking effect. This was very odd because we were sure that...
View ArticleA Custom Module Is Always Better than a Joomla Plugin
When a Joomla developer is asked to add some JavaScript tracking code to a Joomla website, he typically codes a content plugin in order to achieve this result. This, of course, works. But, it’s a very...
View ArticleProtecting Joomla’s Files and Directories from Accidents
A few days ago, a managed client of ours called us and told us that their website stopped working, and that that event coincided when an employee was trying to upload a file to the images folder using...
View ArticleHow to Truncate a Table Using Joomla’s Database Abstraction Layer
We know, you’ve always dreamt of truncating a database table using the Joomla database library, but you didn’t know how to do that, so you used the following code instead: $db = JFactory::getDbo();...
View ArticleHow to Share a Database Table Across Different Joomla Websites
We know, we’ve been lazy this month, as this is our first article and it’s now the 31st – but, we were working on exciting projects so rest assured that we’ll make it up to you in the next month. One...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Seeing Gibberish when Trying to Update a Joomla Website
A client called us yesterday morning and told us that they were having issues trying to update their Joomla website. They didn’t give us any details, they just told us that they were seeing an error...
View Article“The parameter platforminfo.class must be defined.” Error on Joomla
A new client called us a couple of days ago telling us that he successfully updated the Joomla website of the company he works in, however, he told us that they had to revert back because of some...
View ArticleDFP Ad Targeting with HubSpot on a Large Joomla Website
An exciting project that we have just finished is DFP (now Google Ads) ad targeting using HubSpot on a large Joomla website. In short, here’s how the system works: Someone visits the Joomla website and...
View ArticleHow to Load JavaScript Files Asynchronously in Joomla 3.8
In this day and age, most web developers out there want to load everything asynchronously – you know – just to please Google, despite the fact that loading JS files asynchronously may result in some...
View ArticleJoomla’s Search Results Have – How to Fix!
A client of ours emailed us this morning and told us that the search functionality on their website is acting funny, and asked us to take a look. So, we tested the search by entering a term relevant to...
View ArticleHow to Identify Contacts Who Downloaded a File from a HubSpot Page
If you are an avid reader of our blog, you will notice that our main focus is currently on 3 things: security, performance, and marketing. Marketing is an extremely vast domain and our clients always...
View Article“[] operator not supported for strings” Error on Joomla sites
A regular client of ours contacted us this morning telling us that after updating PHP from 5.6 to 7.2 on his server, he saw the following fatal error on the homepage of his company website: [] operator...
View ArticleHow We Modified the Joomla Search Plugin to Include Synonyms
We were commissioned by the marketing department of a global education website to enhance the Search plugin of their Joomla website. In essence, they wanted us to include the synonyms of a word in the...
View Article“End of script output before headers: index.php” Error on Joomla Site
A non-regular client of ours, after updating their Joomla website to 3.9.1 a couple of weeks ago, started seeing the following classical error on their homepage: Internal Server Error What was...
View Article4 Reasons Why Your Joomla Article Updates Are Not Reflecting Immediately
During the past 13 years, we had our fair cases where updates to Joomla articles were not reflecting immediately. We have finally decided to make a quick list containing the 4 reasons of why your...
View ArticleJoomla MySQL Database Unexpectedly Goes Down
We had a weird error yesterday morning. A client emailed us and told us that his Joomla website stopped working all of a sudden, and it was displaying a blank page. We checked his Joomla website and we...
View ArticleThe Importance of Checking the “lfd.log” File
A substantial portion of our work for our managed clients consists of monitoring their servers, and a large part of that monitoring consists of checking the logs, and seeing if there is anything...
View ArticleLoad Issues on Your Joomla Site? Maybe it’s Clamd!
One of our clients was having serious load issues on their Joomla website during peak hours. At first, we thought it was MySQL – but further investigation revealed another, more subtle culprit: it was...
View ArticleThe Ideal Server for a Large Joomla Website
We are currently moving a large client of ours to a very powerful server, and we thought it would be a good idea to share the hardware specifications of said server with our lovely readers (all 1...
View Article“0 – Using $this when not in object context” Joomla Error After Updating to...
After updating PHP through EasyApache 4 to PHP 7.3 and then changing the PHP version in the MultiPHP Manager to 7.3, we encountered the following error on a Joomla website: 0 – Using $this when not in...
View ArticleBefore Optimizing Your Joomla Website
At itoctopus, we have optimized many, many Joomla sites and we have written many articles on optimizing Joomla sites. But, before optimizing any Joomla website, we do check/ask about the server...
View ArticleFiltering Out Bad/Bot Traffic in Google Analytics
A couple of weeks ago, we received an interesting email from the marketing team of a high traffic Joomla website: they told us that their traffic in Google Analytics was increasing substantially, and...
View ArticleHow We Are Handling Traffic from Bots
An emerging and an extremely annoying issue that (almost all) large websites are currently experiencing is bot traffic. Of course, bot traffic has always been an issue, but it was, to a certain extent,...
View ArticleAdding Complex Logic to HubSpot Emails
One of HubSpot’s powerful features is the ability to have a workflow send an email. Typically, the workflow contains the logic (if-then-else), and the email contains some dynamic data, such as the...
View ArticleWeird Error While Updating a Joomla Website
While trying to update a Joomla website to the latest version we encountered the following weird error: Could not open...
View ArticleOur New Passion: Integrations
For the past decade, our (almost) exclusive focus was the Joomla product. However, in the past few years, we suffered from an increasing appetite to a specific marketing niche: integrations. We tried...
View ArticleJoomla’s Biggest Drawback: Sorting
We manage very large Joomla installations, and a constant question we get from editors working on these websites is: “I am trying to order articles on my website, but it is not working, how do we do...
View ArticleIncreasing K2’s Limit to More than 100 Items
While working on a Joomla website powered by K2, we noticed that one of the pages, containing a big list of company names, is only limited to display the first 100 companies. We checked the backend of...
View ArticleHow We Added HubSpot Pages As Events in Google
A client of ours asked us to list some of their HubSpot pages as virtual events in Google. These pages were mainly webinar registration forms. To the untrained eye, the task seems to be very simple,...
View ArticleHow We Created a Multi-Step Form in HubSpot
As you may already know, HubSpot only allows for single-step forms. They don’t have a built-in function to create multi-step forms. They do advertise a workaround, which is creating two landing pages,...
View ArticleHow Leads Can Download Multiple Gated Assets with One HubSpot Form
Here’s the problem: A client of ours has many gated whitepapers on HubSpot, and they wanted to group them into pages where each page contains the related whitepapers, by topic. So, in essence, the...
View ArticleThe Elusive “Thank You” Message On HubSpot Forms
Say you have a HubSpot form that you want people to fill in. The HubSpot form that you have is very long with many input fields that you need for your business. You embed it on one of your pages and...
View ArticleHow to Disallow Google from Indexing Your HubSpot Gated Documents
Here’s a common scenario: you create a HubSpot landing page with a form. Once people fill in that form, they are redirected to a gated document (possibly an e-book or a whitepaper). The system is...
View ArticleHow We Blocked an IP from Accessing HubSpot Pages
It’s Saturday, and we received an interesting email from one of our clients. The client said that someone was manually spamming their HubSpot forms with odd data. HubSpot is good at blocking spammers,...
View ArticleModulo by Zero Error when Migrating to Joomla 4
We are currently migrating a Joomla 3 website to Joomla 4. Among the hundreds of errors that we saw during the migration process, there was this one: Modulo by Zero This error was interesting, because...
View Article“0 Missing field in database: Joomla\CMS\Table\Extension extension_id” Error...
Note: This post partly assumes that your server is running WHM/cPanel. Solutions may differ if your server is running a different platform. About a week ago, a client approached us and told us that...
View ArticleMigrating K2 to Joomla 4 – Why We Gave Up!
Note: Needless to say, it is important that you backup your website before migrating to Joomla 4. Warning: Before migrating to Joomla 4 from Joomla 3, it is critical that K2 (as an extension) is...
View ArticleThe Case Against Joomla’s “Redirect” Extension
Almost a decade ago, we explained how Joomla’s Redirect Manager extension works. Fast forward to now (April 2023), nothing really has changed; the system still works in the same weird and inefficient...
View ArticleHow to Check if a User Is Logged In from an External Script in Joomla 4
We were recently tasked with an interesting and what we thought was a simple task: a client asked us to write a script that checks if a user is logged in to a Joomla 4 website from an external website...
View ArticleErrcode: 30 “Read-only file system” Fatal Error on Joomla 4 Site
Yesterday morning was unsettling to us – to say the very least, as were faced with a blank page when we were checking the homepage of a Joomla 4 website of one of our regular clients. Our first...
View ArticleJoomla 4 Update Failing – Possible Cause
While trying to upgrade the Joomla websites for one of our clients to the latest Joomla 4 version, we ran into the infamous “red screen” Joomla error page with the following ambiguous error: “An error...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Joomla 4 vs Joomla 5 – Which One Is Faster?
A very common question that we get from our clients who are hesitant to migrate to Joomla 5 is: “Does it run any faster than Joomla 4”? Our answer is: “We don’t know, but we’ll soon run some benchmarks...
View ArticleA Quick Guide to Optimizing Joomla 5 By Disabling Plugins
Note: It is important to know that your Joomla setup may require any of the plugins disabled below, so it’s a good idea (make that a mandatory idea) to test the whole website during off hours or on a...
View ArticleA Free, Simple, and Efficient Heartbeat System for Your Joomla Site
We monitor the Joomla sites of our enterprise clients – and we do not do so with the help of a paying 3rd party tool – we do so with a little tool that we developed ourselves. The tool is nothing...
View ArticleHow to Print a Joomla Query from PHP
So you’re working on a new extension, or in the Joomla core itself, and you’re using a DatabaseQuery object, and you want to print the query object as a SQL string. How do you do that? Well, assuming...
View ArticleHow to Make Usernames in Joomla 4/5 Case Sensitive
Last week, we were tasked by a new client to make the usernames on their Joomla 5 website case sensitive. For example, they wanted to have something like “admin” and “Admin” as different usernames –...
View ArticleHow to Disable Article/Category Hit Tracking in Joomla 4/5
Almost 11 years ago, we published an article on how to disable hit tracking in Joomla. The process explained in that old article worked for Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.5 and 3 (it didn’t work for Joomla...
View Article
