I’m working on someone’s website that’s managed using Joomla 1.5.26, and am finding all sorts of problems. In various places, there are multiple redirects when clicking a link or submitting a form, and I can’t figure out why. The site was worked on by people before me and it’s definitely the changes they made that are causing it, but I have very little experience in Joomla and don’t know where to start.
I’m currently trying to figure out why a link is redirecting the way it is. It’s a menu option on one of the side navigations and leads to a page that, for some reason, lacks the beginning html, body, head, etc. tags. At the bottom of this page are html and head tags, the head tag containing a meta tag for an http “refresh”. This links to a page with the same url but with the addition of "?fid=367". I’ve found what they changed that’s causing the redirect, so I’m trying to backtrack to figure out how to avoid the need to redirect. I’m first trying to understand why the beginning html tags aren’t showing up, but, as I said, I’m not sure where to start with Joomla.
Apart from starting over, are there any debugging tools/methods that would help me? As organized as Joomla is, it’s still hard to navigate the various includes and function calls that happen all over the place.
The best way to debug Joomla! is to install in on a local development server with your favourite PHP IDE that works with Zend Debug or XDebug. Then with a tool like Eclipse you can step through the code and find out what’s going on.
Failing that if you’re working on a remote copy of the site then I’d turn on debugging mode and use JDump and lot’s of
print_r()etc to help you track down the problem. Unfortunately the debug mode in the 1.5.x line isn’t as nice as the 2.5 line but it can be helpfull.Just remember if you use JDump! to: