Technology Blog

Are you experiencing a blank frontend/frontpage after upgrading to Joomla 3.5?

Chances are that you have either of these two problems;

1) Non compatible Template.

If you like me are using Artisteer as your template development software, simply open your current template in a current version of Artisteer, then save and export a new template. Then install the new template onto your Joomla site and activate this. Finally clear the cache to see if that has made any difference to you.

If you however are using a purchased template, then look to see if there has been an update released by the template developer.

2) Non compatible Joomla Extension.

If the template trick didn't work it is likely that one of your Joomla Extensions are causing this error.

In my case it was the extension called ARI Image Slider (mod_ariimageslider) that caused this. I then simply downloaded the updated module from the developers site, installed that, and viola everything was back to normal.

In the last couple of weeks I have come across two Windows machines that were painstakingly slow after they recently availed of the free upgrade to the Windows 10.

The common symptom between these two pc's was that when looking in the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) I found that the disk was running at 100% constantly. (see picture below)

The solution in both cases was to simply go to the notification settings (goto: Start - Settings - System - Notifications & Actions) and disable the "Show me tips about windows" option.

You will thereafter most likely need to restart the PC to effectuate these settings.

In both my cases the above was enough to bring the system back to a normal level again.

From Joomla 3.2, a "Super User" logged into the frontend should be able to edit website modules. This is a great feature that enable you to update the website without accessing the Joomla backend.

In order to use this feature you first need to enable that feature in "Global Configuration"

You can see the configuration setting in the image below, it is called "Mouse-over Edit Icons for........." as you see of the image below I have chosen to activat this feature for both modules and menus. (click on image to expand).

After that setting is configured, a user loggedon to the frontend should be able to see the edit button when hovering over a module on the site.

HOWEVER, if you like me are using Artisteer as your template creation tool, then you will still have a problem as Artisteer out of the box does not support the feature.

You will therefore have to add some additional code in Artisteer under the "Export options" - "CSS Options"

The code to be added is:

{spic}.icon-edit:before { content: url('/../images/system/edit.png'); }{/spic}

See picture below (click on image to expand):

Finally you need to save and export your amended template, and then install and activate this, and viola, you should now be able to use the new "Frontend Module Editing" feature on your Joomla website.

Joomla is continously improving, and one of the new things introduced in Joomla 3.2 was something called Content Version Control.

Content Version Control means that Joomla can be configured to save the last e.g. 10 versions of each article.

I previously used a third party extension for this while on Joomla 2.5, but as this now is a part of Joomla core functionality it is even better.

The only thing you need to do is to activate this function.

Simply do the following to activate Content Version:

1) Login to Joomla Admin

2) Go to Article Manager

3) Click on OPTIONS ( Top right corner)

4) Click on "Editing Layout"

5) Enable Versions

6) Change "Maximum Versions" if you want more than 10 to be stored.

7) Save and Close

You should now have activated the Content Version Control.

From now on you will see a new button on the top of the Article Manager when working on an article. This button is called "Versions", you can click on that so see and rollback/revert to previous versions of your Joomla article. (See image below)

A handful of times I have come across the following error after trying to login to the Joomla backend of a website:

403 - You can not login to the site. Please, contact webmaster

The problem is happening on sites I earlier had upgraded from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 using the Jupgrade extension.

To solve this problem:

1) Take a backup of your site (just to be sure)

2) To sort this you simply have to login to your database via phpMyAdmin (In your Cpanel).

3) Here you will have to look for the table called "jos_categories" (You will here have to change "jos" to whatever your prefix is.

4) In _categories you will have to look for the column called "extension"

5) Change the name any rows under "extension" called "com_contact" to "com_contact_details"

You should hopefully now be sorted.