Audience Level : Joomby  

It is often difficult for new users of Joomla to know where to start.

It can be quite daunting to open the administrator panel and be faced with a wide array of menus and icons. I know the one question that I had when I started was : “How do you get stuff onto the front page?”

This tutorial will therefore focus on a brief overview of how Joomla is structured and what the main building blocks are. Hopefully this will give you a better idea of how things fit together!

Tags : webdesign, web design, web development, web2.0, IT careers, specialization

Here is a web design theory : websites are like onions, you see, since websites have layers. And ogres are like onions, since  ogres have layers. Websites are designed by web designers. Ergo - web designers are like ogres.

So, let's explore why web designers are like ogres.

You could possibly have the following problems with either the Administration backend and/or with the WYSIWYG editor.

Problem 1:

You might get a blank screen when you try to log in to the Administration backend. This is almost always because your 'live-site' setting in your Configuration.php file doesn't correspond with your Administration URL. You either have a www in your live-site setting in your configuration.php file and you are accessing your administration backend without the www or vice versa.

Problem 2:

You might log into the administration backend and find that none of your menus are showing! After lots of searching I found that this was an Internet Explorer Cache problem. The menus were showing fine when I accessed the Admin backend through Firefox.

Clear your IE cache by going into Tools->Internet Options and deleting your temporary Internet files. This solved the problem of my menu tabs not showing in the Admin backend.

Problem 3:

You might get one or more of the following problems when you try to use the WYSIWYG editor:

When you try to open a popup, for example when you try to insert an image into your content, or a table, you might get this message and the popup will show a blank window:

"tinyMCE object reference not found from pop up"

You might also get this error or something similar:

error tinyMCE has no properties in
mambots/editors/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/
advanced/jscripts/source_editor.js
line 51

or an error referring directly to not being able to find tiny_mce_popup.js or that tiny_mce_popup is undefined.

Please note that sometimes the Popup will be blank, with just the little yellow triangle in the left-hand corner of your Internet Explorer indicating that there was a Javascript error. Double-Click on the triangle to see what the actual error was. In Firefox you can look at Tools->Javascript Console. The problem ocurred under Firefox too.

This problem can be related to one, (or more!) of the following: 

1. Please note that you should go into your Mambots and check first that your WYSIWYG mambots are correct, especially if you have installed/uninstalled some special WYSIWYG editors previously.   

2. Make sure that your live site setting in your Configuration.php has the www if you are accessing your admin backend through your URL WITH the www. This is probably the most common cause of the problem

3. This problem could also be related to file permissions of your editor mambot directories. If you were doing an upgrade from Mambo to Joomla and copied files across from different folders, the file permissions could also have changed when you copied the files across from your Joomla sub-folder where you tested your installation to their permanent home. If you followed my Mambo to Joomla Upgrade procedure  and made a list of the required file permission that I suggested in Step 2 of the upgrade path, you should use this list  to make sure that the mambots/editors directory has the right permissions.

4. In the end, in my case, this error was due to cache, again! Make sure that your Joomla cache settings are correct and that your cache directory is writeable. Clean out the cache folder just to make sure. But the biggest problem is your Internet Explorer cache. I traced the source of the problem to the html file called source-editor.htm.  This file is located here:

/public_html/mambots/editors/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/
themes/advanced/source-editor.htm

You will see that this html file refers to two external javascript files. First make sure that these Javascript files are not corrupted by pasting their location/path directly into your browser, for example:

http://www.sitename.com/mambots/editors/tinymce/jscripts/
tiny_mce/tiny_mce_popup.js

In IE you should  get the option of running or saving the file. Open the file in an editor to see if the code looks OK.

If this is OK, then you should try and force IE to read the actual source-editor.htm and not the one in cache. If you paste the path of this html file into your browser and execute in a standalone way, you should also get the error related to the popup.

For example:

http://www.sitename.com/mambots/editors/tinymce/jscripts/
tiny_mce/themes/advanced/source-editor.htm

Keep on executing this file, refreshing it until it loads eventually without the Javascript error. You should then be able to go back to your Admin backend and use the popups in your WYSIWYG editor. If you had this problem in Firefox, you need to clear the cache in Firefox too. You can do this by going into Firefox and doing the following:

1. Click Tools and select Options.
2. Click the Privacy Icon.
3. Click Clear across from the Cache option.
4. Click Ok.
5. Exit and relaunch.

This solved my TinyMCE problem with inserting images, tables etc.

Tags: Joomla, WYSIWYG, Editors