The hit counter mechanism in Joomla is used to display content by popularity or most viewed via modules or menu links. In most smaller sites, it doesn't pose an issue but on large content sites, because the hit counting feature locks the content table, this can be a problem - especially during heavy traffic periods. If you run a large content site on Joomla and still want to use this feature, we can modify the code to solve this issue and/or offer alternatives solutions. Get in touch

To disable hit counting for Joomla articles and categories, we navigate into the Options area for the articles section. When logged in as an administrator, navigate to Content > Articles and on the Articles page, click the Options button in the top right. On the Options page, in teh first tab named Articles scroll down to find the Record Hits toggle and switch it to off.

Congratulations! You have just disabled the counter mechanism that tracks hits in Joomla 4. 

Do you need help with a Joomla issue? Get in touch for specialist help.

Recently we had a client project where we used Virtuemart 4 Custom Fields extensively for product attributes along with CSV Improved for product data import. Despite haaving the Custom Field setup for Show Labels set to yes, we would find that the labels were not showing up after importing new data. To solve this we accessed the database directly to find the setting which controls the visibility of the labels in for the custom field dropdowns we see on the single product page for Virtuemart.  

If we view the database table #__virtuemart_product_customfields we can see the field customfield_params contains a boolean variable showlabels=0 which we we need to switch to showlabels=1 for teh labels to appear on the frontend single product page again. If you have many records to update you could do this with a query, or manually if you have only a few to update. Remember to always have backups before running queries directly on your database or better yet, create a development or staging version to test your work on before deploying to a production environment. 

In this case we had just a few to change so we manually updated the variable to showlabel=1 and the resulting labels then showed as expected on the front end. 

Do you need help with a Joomla or Virtuemart problem? Get in touch for specialist help.

Support for Joomla 3.10 has officially ended and now all Joomla 3 sites warn administrators to migrate to Joomla 4 as soon as possible. In this article we'll show you what that process entails, so you can decide to start migrating directly or ask for help where you need it. Here at The Joomla Expert, we provide fixed price proposals for Joomla migrations! We have been offering Joomla development services since the very beginning of Joomla, from 1.0 through to today's Joomla 4 migration needs. 

Can we skip the Joomla 4 migration?

In the short term - Yes - Joomla 3 is a very stable CMS and over the years we have noted that Joomla CMS tends to degrade quite gracefully. Typically, when there is a failure it typically presents a message that tells us what the problem is. However. the main reason we find customer require Joomla 3 to Joomla 4 migrations are because hosting companies are now also upgrading server software, such as updating PHP to PHP8. This often causes PHP to throw errors, as code is deprecated. Typically, this is code in the template or a 3rd party extension rather than Joomla core itself. This is a pretty bad scenario because typically it will mean your business website is either entirely offline, or is showing serious errors to your customer base. 

Joomla 3.10 is soon to be at its End of Life (EoL) stage and so all Joomla 3.10 sites are now warning administrators to migrate to Joomla 4 as soon as possible. In this article we'll quickly run you through the scope of that process so you can get started migrating or ask for help where needed. At The Joomla Expert, we have provided Joomla migration services since the very beginning of Joomla, from 1.0 through to today's Joomla 4 migration needs. 

Warning
Support ends on 17 August 2023 for Joomla 3.10. Migrate to Joomla 4 as soon as possible.

Do we really need to migrate our Joomla website?

The short answer is no - the Joomla 3 CMS is very stable and tends to degrade gracefully - i.e. when there is a failure it typically presents a message that tells us what the problem is. In fact, we even have some past clients still running Joomla 1.5 sites, the codebase for which has been EoL since January 1st 2012, and is still running 11 years later! That said, older versions of Joomla are slower and can be vulnerable to malware because no new security patches are to be released for these versions. The main reason we find people requesting Joomla 4 migrations are when their hosting company upgrade the PHP or MySQL version on the server, which causes PHP code deprecation to run and either display issues or make the software throw a server error. This is really the worst scenario, when your live site is no longer available. Which leads us to the long answer.