WASHINGTON DC Joomla development company – Herndon, Virginia
When it comes to editing page content in Joomla, it can be confusing to know where to look unless you’re already familiar with the inner workings of the software. I encountered an issue on a client’s Jooma website in which an image on the front page had an onmouseover attribute which caused the image to break every time a user hovered their mouse over it by replacing the src attribute with an invalid URL. Just by viewing the source, I was able to immediately determine what the issue was and what needed to be done to fix it: because no other images in that section of the site had any mouse hover event and this particular one was causing the image to break, I decided that the best solution to the issue was to simply remove the attribute.
However, when I went to look for the file containing the content, which appeared to be static rather than contained in the database, I was completely lost. I had to determine whether or not the content was a part of a component, a module, a plugin, or an extension; I spent a good hour poring over the files on the client’s server, trying to locate the specific one that served that content. By searching for the container divs I saw in the source code, I was able to locate the file with the basic overall layout, but the specific content I was looking for was in no obvious place in the file system.
Finally, I decided to log into the administration back-end and and looked at the Module Management section. It provided a list of files which stored their content in the database, rather than the file system. By comparing a CSS class from the source code to the name of the files, I was able to fairly easily locate the file that needed to be edited.
However, this brought me to another issue. Apparently, of all of the files available for editing in the module management section, the only one I needed to access was also the only one that the client had recently checked out for editing, which meant that I was not able to edit it until they checked it back in. So what I ended up having to do was set up a quick meeting with the client so that I could explain the issue. They unlocked the file and I was able to easily edit the custom HTML content to apply the fix.
In the end, a simple change that should have taken no more than five or ten minutes, took me something like two hours. Of course, most of that time was due to me being unfamiliar with Joomla’s inner workings and therefore not knowing where to look to change the code, but there was also the time spent contacting the client before I could actually apply the fix. Hopefully by reading this, you will be able to avoid spending a lot of time trying to find the right place to edit any specific content.
