When trying to add a Plugin, Component or Module in Joomla’s Extension Manager, you might get the following error:

JFolder::create: Could not create directory
Warning! Failed to move file.

Shown here:

This is likely – but not definitely – to be after the site has been moved from location to another, a change of directory, or server.

Solution

When a Component, Plugin or Module is added, the Joomla system attempts to copy the installable zip to a temporary directory, called ‘tmp‘. From there, PHP extracts the files and installs them. The error above usually occurs for one or more of the following reasons (in order of likelihood):

The path to the ‘tmp’ directory is wrong in the Joomla configuration file

In the Joomla installation root, find the file called ‘configuration.php’. In this file there should be a line with that says something like:

var $tmp_path = ‘C:\\path\\to\\your\\cms\\tmp’;

A masked live example is shown here:

Check that this path is correct, and that the ‘tmp’ directory truly does sit in that location. In this example, the directory would need to be here: d:\clients\sites\[my client]\tmp.

The temporary exists, but is not ‘writable’

If the ‘tmp’ directory has the wrong permissions, the web service won’t be able to copy the installer files to it. To check/correct this you will need  access to the server physically, or via a remote admin method like RDP (terminal services), VNC or similar.

Find the ‘tmp’ directory in the web root, and view the permissions. The IIS Guest account, called ‘IUSR_[machinename]‘, needs to be given ‘modify’ privileges. Example shown below:

The temporary directory doesn’t exist

To check this, navigate to your web root (often wwwroot) and check that a directory called ‘tmp‘ exists. This directory should have been created when the Joomla was installed, but it’s conceivable that it might have been deleted… maybe? If it doesn’t exist, create it, and make sure its ‘writable’ (see previous step).

If none of this works, or you spot a mistake,  post a comment.

A coleague wanted to change the default ‘browse’ path that the JCE ‘Image Manager’ and ‘File Browser’ plugins use. By default when you use the plugins, the contents of the ‘Stories’ directory will be displayed. It seems that even if you go into the plugin settings ( under ‘Components > JCE Administration > Plugins > [plugin name]‘ ), and set the ‘File Directory Path’ setting, it still doesn’t change the default path!

Solution

Navigate to Components > JCE Administration > Groups as shown below:

Choose Groups from the main menu...

Then select the group you want to edit. If you haven’t set up any groups, just click on the ‘Default’ group to edit it’s properties. Once the settings are on display, from the right-hand side, under the ‘Editor Parameters’ heading, expand the ‘Plugin Options’ item, and enter your desired path in ‘File Directory Path’:

Note: this must not be set to the Joomla root

Note: The path you enter must be at least one level above the Joomla! root. i.e [root]/myimages/.

Just now, I needed to move a website running Joomla 1.5 and VirtueMart 1.1.2 from the development server, to the live web space. After I had moved the data, and the files, and updated the path in Joomla’s ‘configuration.php’ file, it seemed to work ok, but all the links in the VirtueMart Admin area still pointed to my development server.

Solution

After doing a ‘find in files’ for my development server’s name, I found two more paths that need changing in VirtueMart’s own configuration file. This is the file:

/administrator/components/com_virtuemart/virtuemart.cfg.php

The following two paths need editing to point to the new server location (URL):

define( 'URL', 'http://my.devserver.com/joomla/' );
define( 'SECUREURL', 'https://secure.devserver.com/joomla/' );

A simple fix, but probably worth posting.

In Joomla 1.5, at present, there is no way to set the template applied to an article or category  based on the section that article is in. Templates can be set by menu item, but not by the overall section they reside in. This means that if multiple templates are being used, each time a new article is added, changes have to be made to the template setup too – very tedious. All I wanted was to be able to create an article or category, add it to a certain section, and know that it would be rendered/displayed using a particular template:

Solution

This took some searching and tweaking. I found a post in the Joomla developers forum about someone trying to do something similar, but their example code was broken. It was enough to get me started though.

What you need to do is: find and open application.php in the includes directory on the root of your Joomla 1.5 installation. Then find line 309 or thereabouts and look for this code:

309 // Allows for overriding the active template from the request
310 $template = JRequest::getCmd(‘template’, $template);
311 $template = JFilterInput::clean($template, ‘cmd’); // need to filter the default value as well

Insert AFTER the comment on line 309, but BEFORE line 310, add this code:

// Templates by Section hack – Begin

$eItemView = JRequest::getVar(‘view’);
$eItemId = JRequest::getVar(‘id’);

$sectionId = NULL;

$eItemId = (strpos($eItemId,”:”))? substr($eItemId,0,strpos($eItemId,”:”)) : $eItemId;

switch ($eItemView) {
case “article”:
$edb =& JFactory::getDBO();
$eQuery = ‘SELECT sectionid FROM #__content WHERE id LIKE ‘.$eItemId.”;
$edb->setQuery($eQuery, 0, 1);
$sectionId = $edb->loadResult();
break;
case “category”:
$edb =& JFactory::getDBO();
$eQuery = ‘SELECT section FROM #__categories WHERE id LIKE ‘.$eItemId.”;
$edb->setQuery($eQuery, 0, 1);
$sectionId = $edb->loadResult();
break;
case “section”:
$sectionId = $eItemId;
break;
}

// Edit the section id below, you can find it in the sections admin area.
if ($sectionId == “1″) {
$template = “rhuk_milkyway_red”; // Use the full template name.
}
// Add more if clauses if there are other templates.

// Templates by Section hack – End

Hopefully you can see what this does. It looks for the section id to use in 3 ways, depending on whether joomla is currently displaying a section root page, a category root page, or an article. It then looks to see whether that section id has had a specific template specified for it by name.

This hack works well for me, I only need to add the different template data once in application.php for a given site. Ideally someone needs to make an admin mod for this, so that sections and categories can be assigned different templates in the backend. Maybe one day I’ll make one, but not unless there’s demand

Any questions, corrections or thoughts, please comment below (no need to create an account or anything!)

I’m using AcaJoom Plus as a newsletter component for Joomla, on behalf of a client. While testing the component I found that once the “Change your subscription” and “Unsubscribe” links were appended, it messed up my template and styling. The text is surrounded SPAN with a class called ‘subscriptionlink_nws’ applied to it, but there is only so much you can do with styles in the newsletter itself.

Solution

The ”Change your subscription” and “Unsubscribe” links can be found in the file ‘class.jmail.php’ which sits in: [site root]/administrator/components/com_acajoom/classes/.

Open this file and at around line 76 you should see:

$subscriptionstext = ‘<p>’. $subscriptionslink . ‘<br />’ . $unsubscribelink . ‘</p>’;

I found that simply removing the <p> tags made things instantly better, but you might want to add more custom html in there.

This works for the ‘News’, ‘Plus’ and presumably ‘Pro’ versions of AcaJoom.

Man, this had me tearing my hair out! I was trying to install JCE Editor update 1.1.9.2, for the Joomla Content Editor component/mambot. The mambot installed fine, but whenever I tried to use a Plugin that had a file browse area, I’d see “Restricted Access” in the file list pane. An example is shown here:

Plugin showing Restricted Access

Solution

The problem was lazyness. I hadn’t read the install info thoroughly enough. is says “Joomla! 1.0.13 requires this session fix.” I don’t know exactly what the patch does, but it’s about session’ish’ness, and works a treat!

By the way, If you have a Joomla CMS driven site, and still use the included TinyMCE content editor,  JCE is excellent as a replacement content editor for Joomla 1.0.* and 1.5.* versions. I can also recommend the free and ‘subscription’ JCE plugins.