My links in Joomla's Media Manager are Broken

You may run into the problem that links to thumbnails in the media Manager are broken and that sub directories cannot be opened. You want to insert an image, you do see the names of the pictures in the media manager, you can insert the code in your article, but nothing happens. What to do?

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My Password is Correct but I Cannot Login my Joomla Website

Sometimes, you feel the urge to clean up your system and disable unnecessary plugins or you may have the need to disable plugins to figure out where a javascript conflict comes from. Although this is not a bad habit, you need to know which plugins need to stay active. One of those plugins is the User - Joomla! login plugin.

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There was an error uploading this file to the server.

If you upload large extensions ( > 2 MB ) to your joomla website running WAMP, you may run into the following error: There was an error uploading this file to the server.

As a default, the maximum size of the database is 2,048 KB. You can change this in WAMP in case you have a large database. Click with the left mouse on the wamp icon in the toolbar. Select PHP and php.ini. Note book will open and search for the following code: upload_max_filesize = 2M and change it to 4 M or 8M and save the file:

 

The error will no longer appear when you upload an extension that is smaller than the max you have set in the php.ini.

Top 10 Tips For Speeding Up Joomla Websites

Not everyone has access to fast Internet. In many developing countries, Internet is provided through slow satellite links. We managed to improve access to Joomla sites dramatically in terms of speed by using the following settings and guidelines:

 

Step 1: Enable the cache option in global configuration. Please be aware: with this option enabled, you may not see the changes you have made to your site immediately. And that is a bit the point of caching a site, so that the browser does not need to process information all the time.

Step 2: Enable GZIP Compression in Global Configuration. We tested access to our Joomla sites with and without this option enabled (using satellite internet links in Afghanistan), and it makes a big difference. I would not worry too much about this if your audience is in the US or Europe with fast internet, but for sites that reach out to people in developing countries or areas with slower internet connections, we recommend that you use the GZIP option. You can see our GZIP tutorial here.

Step 3: Minimize the number of components and modules you use. The more extensions you use, the more information needs to be exchanged which slows down your site. We always install a new site without the sample data to avoid modules we do not need (polls, banners, etc).

Step 4: An obvious solution to improve the speed of your website is to limit the size of images. It really makes no sense to use a 800 KB image in a header if you can compress an image to 80 KB with the same image quality. You can also use PNG instead of the larger JPG format for images.

Step 5: Avoid modules and plug ins that read information from other sites, such as world clocks or RSS feeds. They connect to other sites and this costs time.

Step 6: Find a good host that supports GZIP Compression and that has fair use policies for its shared hosting accounts. Some hosts oversell the capacity of their servers. We do recommend www.siteground.com which has been our preferred host since 2007.

Step 7: Avoid templates with many images. The more images you need to load, the slower the page will be loaded.

Step 8: Optimize the Joomla tables. This option has not dramatically increased the performance of our sites, but you may want to look into this if you have long waiting times for queries.

Step 9: Use a free online Web Page Analyzer to find out how you can optimize the site. Web Page Analyzer is a free web page analysis tool that calculates page size, composition, and download times. It gives speed recommendations based on best practices for usability, HCI, and website optimization.

Step 10: Keep the Joomla version up-to-date, not only for security, but also for optimization reasons.

Improving Loading Times of Joomla With GZIP Compression

As one of our tips for optimizing Joomla sites, we recommend that you enable GZIP compression to speed up loading times.

You can enable GZIP compression in the global configuration of Joomla:

 

All you need to do is to enable the setting in the server settings and save the new configuration assuming your host offers this option (most do) .

To see the compression ratio with GZIP enabled, you can visit this website. Just type in the url of your website and check the results online.

 

With GZIP enabled, we accomplished a 72.7% compression resulting in faster loading times.

Checklist For Setting Up a New Joomla Website

Setting up a Joomla website is not as time consuming as many people think. Based on our experience, we have developed a checklist to install and develop a new website for clients.

As a minimum, below is the check list we follow whenever we install a new Joomla website. Depending on the functionality of the site, we install additional components, plugins and modules:

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Loadposition in Table

Tables can be used for some web design purposes. Below we demonstrate that it is easy to insert Joomla menu modules in a table. The menu on the left is inserted in this table and it is easy to change the background color as well.

Showing Joomla Module Positions

Finding a template for Joomla is not easy: You must like the lay-out, it should be well designed, ideally being offered for free and give you a sufficient number of modules positions. But how to find out module positions if documentation is not available for the template?

Step 1: Browse to your favorite Joomla website that uses the template or install it first on your own site

Step 2: Type ?tp=1 behind the URL, e.g., http://www.test.developmentwork.net/?tp=1 and the module positions will be shown.

Step 3: Type ?tp=0 behind the URL, e.g., http://www.test.developmentwork.net/?tp=0  and the site will look normal again.

Missing Modules After New Installation

What happens to the standard modules when you have installed a new Joomla! version without the sample data?

When you install Joomla! without the sample data, several modules are not installed as a default. As a result, you will not find them in your module manager. Joomla! nevertheless has installed the modules and they can be activated by following these steps:

Step 1: Go to the module manager.

Step 2: Click on new module.

Step 3: Select the module from the list.

Step 4: Activate the module and set the parameters if needed.

Welcome to the Frontpage - How to Remove This in Joomla?

When you install a new version of Joomla!, it automatically adds the following text to your mainmenu: "Welcome to the Frontpage". How do we remove this?

Step 1: Login into the administration site.

Step 2: Go to Menus and select Main Menu.

Step 3: Go to the first item on the menu - "Home".

Step 4: Select the system parameters and delete or edit the page title.

Step 5: Disable "show title" if you do not want the title text to be displayed.

Step 6: Save changes.

If you refresh the page, you will see the "welcome to the Frontpage" text is either deleted or it shows the new text you entered in the system parameters for the Main Menu.

Inserting HTML and Scripts in Joomla Articles

Inserting html and scripts directly in Joomla articles (not using modules) or the plain html editor can be tricky. The reason: Joomla's standard editor TinyMCE and others automatically clean articles from tags such as applets and scripts when it saves an article.

This is perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of Joomla. Especially if you want to use the interactive tools we present on this site, you need to have the ability to call scripts in an article.

We use Sourcerer to solve this issue. Developed by NoNumber, a high quality Joomla extension developer, the plugin allows you to insert scripts in pages without changing any of the Joomla settings. All you need to do is insert the code between two tags.

Please keep in mind that you insert the tags and the script directly using the WYSIWYG editor (see picture above) and not in the html view of the editor.

For more info, please visit the NoNumber website.