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

Joomla is great for building all sorts of websites, but I find that the real power comes from being able to mix and match PHP/MySQL code with the rest of the Joomla code.

There are numerous ways to do this:

1. If you want to do it the right way then you can always write a custom module or component. A module is not that difficult, but a component is a bit of a different story. I am not going to go into how to write a component here, since the focus of this entry is rather on doing a quick and dirty!
   
   I've seen this Extension on the Joomla site:
   It is a Developer Toolkit for Joomla that, among other things,  "creates boiler plate components" - will check it out one of these days and write up some feedback.
   
   
2. You can use the Static Files component. I used this quite extensively on some of my sites, and it works quite well.
   
   You can download it from http://www.joomlaxt.com/ and the author has now written up a quick guide that should help you get going with it. You can find it on this link.
   
   Update : 26 Jan 2008: I do not use this at all any more, but rather KL_PHP, as described below.
   
   
3. But here is the clincher! The BEST way to do 'quick-and-dirty' PHP programming inside Joomla is to use this mambot: KL_PHP. This mambot is not publically available any more but you can download here KL_PHP Mambot.
   Also, you cannot use this bot directly in modules, for that you require the module: mod_kl_evalphp.zip
   Now, I do realise that there are other options available by now, as also commented on below, however, this has worked very well for me up to now so I am not really interested at this stage to try something else!
   
4. Here are my tips to get the most out of it:

• Firstly, don't even try and use it if you have your WYSIWYG editor on. The WYSIWYG editor will destroy some of your code and you can never be sure that the code that you entered so painstakingly will still be there after you've saved it. So be sure to turn your WYSIWYG OFF when you use it in any page.
• Then make sure that the Mambot is actually published!
• I use the Joomla 'Static Pages' for almost all my PHP code. Since they don't belong to any categories, it makes it easy to just create a page and refer to it directly.
• Since I use either s404SEF or OpenSEF, all my Static Pages have nice names like '/select-item.html', or '/display-pics.html'. You can now do the following directly in your pages:

You can then create a 'Static Page'. Make the name and title both 'some page' and link it to a menu item called 'Some Page'. I normally use the Othermenu or Usermenu to publish these types of pages for testing purposes. Your 'Some Page' page with your kl_php mambot will then look like this:

Here are a couple of power tips:

• You can use multiple { kl_php } ... { /kl_php } combinations through your page, but if you want to refer to $inv_num, as in the example above, later on in your page inside a different { kl_php } ... {/kl_php} block, you have to declare it as global first in the other blocks else it it won't have the value you originally assigned to it, it will be seen as a new variable.
• Apart from that, you can also include other PHP files inside your { kl_php }... { /kl_php} block. This is very powerful since if you don't want to be bothered with writing your PHP code inside your Joomla content, you can write it as external PHP files and just include the PHP files. For maintenance purposes this might be better since if anything happens to your Joomla installation your PHP code will be gone too! 
• PLEASE NOTE: FOR SECURITY PURPOSES ALWAYS INCLUDE A CHECK AT THE TOP OF YOUR FILE TO MAKE SURE THAT THE INCLUDED FILE IS CALLED FROM THE JOOMLA ENVIRONMENT. For example, make sure that you include the following line at the top of your included PHP code:
  
  defined( '_VALID_MOS' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );
  
• You can print output directly to the front end by using 'echo' and 'print' - at least in all the cases that I've used it. In some of the older forum entries it is specified that you should use 'Return' to output any values to the front end, however, I have not found that to be the case any more.
• In my most recent usage of this mambot, I have even found that it is possible to sessions.  It is therefore possible to code quite complex applications directly into your Joomla content by passing parameters through forms as well as sessions.  

This is just a quick write-up of the basic functionality of this great extension - any more questions, just write a comment or drop me an email and I will see if I can elaborate.

I realised today that I didn't have a proper 404 page and some of my links have changed recently. It is also quite astounding what crap the search engines can sometimes index. One wonders what the use is of submitting a sitemap to Google if it just stubbornly refuses to GET RID of a link like

Email benefits Web Statistics Tailormade4you Website Design ...

I had moved all my hosting related pages to our new site dealing specifically with Hosting (http://www.internet-web-hosting.co.za) and deleted the hosting related pages from this website. But no, Google, in its wisdom, KNOWS WHAT'S BEST. 

Supplemental Results - the bane of my life.

So I decided to set up a proper 404 page. I saw in some research that it is probably a good idea to make your 404 page a search page. Now that's a cool idea!

So I set it up as follows:

1. I created a Static Content page called 'search the site'.
2. Then I inserted the search module inside the Joomla content. This is how you can do it: 

   Use either MosModule or Modulebot2. I used to use Modulebot2 previously and it still works, so I just kept on using it. You need to install it and rember to activate it in your Mambots section. Create a test page to see how to use the parameters. If you insert  { modulebot2 list }  (take out the spaces between the text and the brackets!) in your content, you will see the following on the front end: Modulebot2 Usage: { modulebot2 module=module name } { modulebot2 position } - position = a block position (user1, top, left, etc) { modulebot2 list } - display a list of modules and block positions Available Modules   Available Positions Archive    banner Banners   bottom Latest News  inset Random Image   left Search   top Newsflash   user3   This way you can see exactly what your modules are called. Now if you want to include the search module you would include { modulebot2 module=search } in your content.

3. I linked the Static content to a Menu Item called 'Search the site'. Then I went into my OpenSEF Configuration. In the SEF TAB there is a setting where you can set the 404 page - I set this directly to http://www.tm4y.co.za/search-the-site.html. The OpenSEF component itself created the Search Engine Friendly URL based on the menu item that I created for the Static page.

This guy wanted to have a house. So he started with one red paperclip that he traded for something else. And so on. The social dynamics of the whole thing is starting to become almost more interesting than the actual trading aspect. But if you always wanted to have a film role and you have something valuable to trade, you can head on over to his blogspot - One Red Paperclip and see what you can contribute.

Just don't get caught up reading all the offers for hours on end - you'll laugh your head off for one...

Edited : 12 July 2006

It looks as if he did it! Today, 12 July 2006, Kyle will be visiting the Town of Kipling, Saskatchewan,  in Canada to confirm the trade of the movie contract with a house in Main street.

Congratulations to Kyle - especially for the fun trip and showing us that anything is possible!

Actually I have no idea what that means. We came across these pictures on a site that looks like a type of Russian MySpace combined with Blogspot.

But you don't need to understand Russian to enjoy these. See if you can figure out what they are....

Eatoni is a company that creates predictive text interpreters for cellphones (well, handheld devices). They cover quite a lot of languages - for us South Africans, of interest would be that they have Afrikaans as well as Venda, Xhosa and Zulu.

I recently decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my site from Mambo 4.5.2 to the latest release of Joomla. I had been putting it off since frankly, it is a lot of effort to go through and from the front end the site looks no different!

But I wanted to install some new components and besides, I had decided to throw in my weight behind Joomla so I went through the pain.

Click on 'Read more' below to read the full upgrade story:

1. You can't make updates to your website to reflect new products or changes in your business.
2. Your website is not bringing in the number of visitors and customers that you expected
   

We'll be able to help with both...