pwrusr.com

Recently I encountered a whole load of problems related to Joomla and my new business open source web site.

Here I’m gonna post some general info and experiences, useful to troubleshoot possible joomla problems, especially related to when you’re unable to login to the administrator backend (I know how it feels, just free your mind: computers are numbers and circuits).

What I am sharing here is my reaction to frustration, with suggestions and feedback received from the official joomla! forum and the official joomla! italian community (thanks – you know who you are).

please check here: http://forum.joomla.it/index.php/topic,56790.0.html and

and here: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=431&t=262426

The first thing I feel to suggest you is to check configuration.php and .htaccess files on you site’s root.

It’s important for configuration.php not to contain any blank lines; also, check this file in respect to the Linux/UNIX text file conventions. On Windows, text file lines’ are terminated with a CRLF, on Linux/UNIX instead, the lines of a text file are terminated with just a LF (for a tutorial on what that means, check here: http://usertools.plus.net/tutorials/id/22).

The .htaccess (on the contrary of configuration.php), may contain blank lines, just make sure that, if any, they respect the ‘foretold Linux/UNIX text file conventions (lines have to be ended by LFs); also, check and make sure the rules are correct and there are no hidden CRLF after the rules declarations (in case of doubt, restore the original htaccess.txt from an untouched joomla! build).

From my experience, those checks helped me solve my admin loop, cannot login problems; an obvious way to avoid this kind of problems is to become a power user on the Linux side (aka pwrusr), but that’s a personal choice! If working directly on your joomla! site with, say, Ubuntu, these problems would’nt have ever happened to any of us (I admit it: I was jerking on my site with my powerful Vista64 gaming rig).

Another useful thing to check for, is to make sure you have the right PHP version: make sure your host is serving you with PHP 5 (since joomla was made with it). How to discover if you have PHP5 if you can’t access the admin backend? Well, upload on your site’s root the uncompressed file JTSPOST (here: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/jts/frs/), and open the address corresponding to the copied file’s name. Once you open it up, it’s gonna give you some useful info about joomla! and your server, included what php version you have.
Please remeber that if you happen to fix your problem, then remove JTSPOST from your server’s root, because if you forgive it there, you may leave a possible information security hole.

OK, so, going on, as I said, I checked the joomla! official forums, and referred to them for other possible problems and related suggestions, wich I will report here for the sake of completeness (note that I edited some parts for some added clarity):

Suggestion n.1)

1. edited the file administrator/components/com_login/admin.login.php to comment out line 69 (//LoginController::display() )
2. browsed to the login page.
3. [tried to login] and got an ‘Invalid token‘ message.
4. Reedited the [administrator/components/com_login/]admin.login.php file to remove my comment at line 69.
5. Refreshed the login page in my browser and got the normal login form.
6. Logged in [successfully].

 try this and if it doesn’t work, then:

Suggestion n.2) [user inoxfire]

1. edit file administrator/components/com_login/admin.login.php [to comment out line 57, // JRequest::checkToken('request') or jexit( 'Invalid Token' );]
2. browsed to the login page.
3. [tried to login] and got an ‘Invalid token‘ message.
4. Reedited the [administrator/components/com_login/]admin.login.php file to remove my comment at line 57.
5. Refreshed the login page in my browser and got the normal login form.

 try this and if it doesn’t work, then:

Suggestion n.3)

1. Log into phpMyAdmin and navigate to the jos_plugins table.
2. Look for the "User – Joomla!".
3. Ensure that it is published as mine was not (set published to 1 just in case).
4. [Look for] in row "Authentication – Joomla"
5. Ensure that it is published as mine was not (set published to 1 just in case).

 try this and if it doesn’t work, then:

1. first check your Super Admin status:
   [Open PHPmyAdmin] in the "jos_users" table set SuperAdmin to:
   – field "id" – value "62"
   – field "gid" – value "25" or "26".
2. in the "jos_core_acl_aro" table find row for "62":
   – field "id" – write this down (should be 10 normally) – this is the "aro_id".
3. in the "jos_core_acl_groups_aro_map" table find row for "aro_id" = 10
   – "group_id" should be "25" or "26".

BONUS:

If, for some reasons, you need to reset your joomla! admin password, or if you need to offer admin access to somebody else, or for whatever the reason, please change it by doing so:

1. Open PHPmyAdmin.
2. access your joomla DB and goto table jos_users.
3. modify "admin"-row and set it’s password code to this: 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3 (it’s the equivalent of ‘admin‘).

(for more info and explanations, check this post over here: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=10985).

Hope this info is useful for everyone, and wish you all have a good time.