Thursday, September 28, 2023

Joomla 3.6.3 Unable To Edit Module

I updated a bunch of sites yesterday after the 3.6.3 release. When I went to add the login module the edit page was complete white with a drop down box. I was deeply concerned and thought maybe this Gantry template was the issue. It was not. I found this page.

https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=709&p=3435967

I refreshed the browser window and everything was fine. Basically came down to Joomla worked on their caching component and you need to manually refresh the page.

Another install I upgraded simply refreshing the cache did not work. I was using Firefox. Firefox is making it tough to find the delete recent history. I had to close out of the administrative area all together. Open a new tab and then the modules were be having the way they should.

The articles are a different story. When I go into edit an article I get the following message.

joomla_3_6_3_update_error

I can still edit and save the article

I hope this helps someone else out there.

 

Help Sucuri Clean Sites

Sucuri Antivirus is a great service. I found an attack on a Joomla 3.5 site where a PayPal form and zip file were inserted into the images folder.

There were the following clues to the attack:

  • PHP & INI files in the images directory
  • New folders called “bt”, “BT”, and “mic” in the images directory.

I contacted Sucuri to see if they wanted my findings and they have an email address to accept this kind of information …. labs@sucuri.net

I hope this helps someone else out there…

 

Are Placeholders 508 Compliant and Should They Be Used Over Labels?

I have a cousin that is blind and fully uses the web. This is amazing to me. When I am building websites I often think about how my site could be used by people with life challenges.

While redoing a site I wondered should I ditch the 508 compliant “label” tag and just use a “placeholder” tag.  After some Google searches and good old common sense I have determined that label tags should stay.

Here are my reasons:

  1. Placeholder text color can be an issue with some users.
  2. Placeholder text can be confusing to screen readers. I personally have no experience with screen readers, but have heard this from screen readers users.
  3. I read that placeholder text can confuse users into thinking the field is already filled out.
  4. I know labels are 508 compliant.

This article was helpful with my determination.

https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2011/02/html5-accessibility-chops-the-placeholder-attribute/

I hope this helps someone else out there…

 

 

JS Jobs – Not Displaying Company Logo on Job Search

I am taking JS Jobs component out for a test drive. I posted a few test jobs from a test company and logo doesn’t show on the jobs page.

I was able to get this to work by doing the following.

In the file “components/com_jsjobs/views/job/joblisting.php” line 75,  I added the following.

<img src="'. $path  .'">'

The whole line now looks like

$html .=        '<div class="js-image"><img src="'. $path  .'">';

I hope this helps someone else out there…

 

Solved – Joomla 3 Localhost – Could not instantiate mail function.

While working on a Joomla site in WAMP I went to test the email and got the following error.

Notice
Could not instantiate mail function.

Here is how I fixed this. This could be the long way, but it worked for me.

  1. I had to set up sendmail. I wrote about my best solution for localhost in this post.
    http://blog.grimeymedia.com/setting-up-mail-service-in-wamp/
  2. Then in Joomla I went to Global Configuration  >> Server tab. At the bottom is “Mail Settings”.
  3. I changed “Mailer” to “Sendmail”, and set the path to  “C:\wamp\sendmail\sendmail.exe”
    sendmail_path_joomla

When using GMail to set this up you will to “turn on” their “use less secure app” setting. Log into your Google account and then Google “use less secure app” and it should link you to the page to turn this on.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

Getting Google to crawl your site

hope While working on our Analytics today I realized Google hasn’t crawled one page in a couple of years. I changed the description in the spring of 2015 and in the Fall of 2016 Google’s index still shows the old data.

I did what I could with the Robots.txt file and adding a new sitemap.xml. Just to make sure I wanted Google to crawl my site again. I did a fetch and render on the one page. In the meantime I went looking for what others are doing .

I came across this video. It is simple and easy. Not sure exactly how affective yet, but a good place to start.

 

I hope this helps someone else out there….

 

Joomla Security Check Extension – trying this one out

Got an email from Joomshine about security. I have had a couple of Joomla sites get attacked, and really want not have to deal with lack of faith that the site is attacker proof.

I downloaded this plugin “Securitycheck”, and I am going to take it for a test run. I will let you know how it goes.  Here is the link.

https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/securitycheck

I hope this helps someone else out there…