Category: Joomla

Add Joomla’s Article Layout as a Body Class

Posted in Joomla

If you are using Joomla’s alternative layouts for certain pages, you might want to target those pages with a css class.

You could add a class directly into the layout file, but since the layout file is inserted into the main component area this only lets you target that specific area and not the page as a whole.

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How to Stop Joomla 3 Loading Bootstrap 2 JavaScript

Posted in Joomla

It used to be easy to remove core JavaScript files from Joomla’s output by unsetting the script at the top of your template’s index file.

unset( $this->_scripts[ JURI::root( true ) . '/media/jui/js/bootstrap.min.js' ] );

For whatever reason, this doesn’t work anymore with Joomla 3.9.

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Using Joomla Custom Fields to Add Canonical URLs

In this article, we are going to add a new field to the article editor screen and use the content of the field to output a canonical link in the head of the page on the article view.

At some point, Joomla’s automatically added canonical links were removed as they didn’t work correctly, so this is a manual workaround to put them back. Continue reading “Using Joomla Custom Fields to Add Canonical URLs” ››

Fixing JSON Data Errors After Updating to Joomla 3.6.3

How to fix fatal errors related to JSON decoding when updating you Joomla core version.

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How to Find the Full Joomla Version in the Site Files

Sometimes, for whatever reason, I need to find out the exact version of Joomla a site is running without being able to access the administration area.

Here’s where to find the version number in the file system.

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Adding a Compile LESS Button to a Joomla 3.2 Template

There was no big announcement, but you may have noticed that the Joomla 3.2.2 templates area now has a compile LESS button when viewing a less file.

I had a look at how to bring this into a custom template without having to use a plugin, giving you the possibility to compile a templates less files from within the template style administration area.

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A reCAPTCHA Plugin for Joomla 1.5

Finding extensions for Joomla 1.5 is not so easy any more, and when you do find something you need there is a good chance it doesn’t work anymore (php versions, api changes etc).

I was asked today to add a recaptcha field to the standard contct form on a 1.5 site. Please, no comments about upgrading, it is not my site and not my decision, the job was to add the field, full stop.

It wasn’t so hard to find an existing plugin, but if you use recaptcha on an existing site then you are probably aware that Google recently changed the urls to access the service.

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Site Sends no Mail After Updating to Joomla 3.2

Unfortunately I was on the receiving end of this bug before finding out that it existed. Apologies to anyone trying to download my extensions – I have just enabled all new user accounts.

Updating to Joomla 3.2 introduces a new option which allows you to disable email sending globally. You can find it in Global Configuration in the server tab under the mail setting options.

For this setting to work it writes a new line in the sites configuration.php file with the following:

public $mailonline = '1';

If the line is not present then it defaults to 0 which effectively disables the sites mailing ability.

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Introducing JoomlaPure – A lightweight, Fully Featured Joomla 3.x Starter Template

Posted in Joomla

I guess it’s been a long time coming but, as more and more sites need to be upgraded to the latest Joomla versions, I finally put together a starter template using the best practices I have built up over the past 6 years of helping people speed up their Joomla websites and helping them share their content over social networks.

What started as something to make my own life easier grew exponentially to include all the things I thought should be included in normal templates but never was. JoomlaPure is everything I need to build a marketable website for any company without having to limit design.

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Fighting Spam on Joomla K2 Based Websites

In the days of Joomla 1.5 there were a few limitations to using core content for anything other than simple pages. Yes, plugins were available but they couldn’t handle things like nested categories, item specific galleries and videos etc etc. Many components were created to combat those limitations but the outright winner in terms of number of users and community is (by a longshot) k2.

Much of its functionality has now made it to the Joomla core (nested categories, tags, featured images) but it continues to be popular with its users (old and new). Sometimes it can be a bugger to configure, but once it’s set up you can have multiple templates with a very flexible output. For an example, take a look at Joomlabamboo’s responsive k2 template set ‘zenkit’.

Unfortunately there is one thing it lacks, and that is good spam prevention. The choices are recaptcha and stopforumspam. These days spammers get increasingly sophisticated in their methods and can get around most things quite easily. Just google ‘captcha bypass’ and look at the prices to see what I mean.

Anyway, I have seen some sites grind to a halt because of the number of spam comments submitted and today I was asked to look at one that was getting hit about once every ten minutes which when having to moderate can be pretty annoying.

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