What?
An article for me or for whoever dares to upgrade their Joomla CMS from version 3 to version 5.

Disclaimer: I'm used to doing this without any third-party extensions. I strongly recommend you do a backup beforehand of the database and of all your files

Why?
I keep getting complaints that my server wants to upgrade my PHP v7.x to PHP v8.x. I also get complaints (from my server not from humans) that my Joomla version needs updating...

I'm writing this in case I ever have to upgrade other people's Joomla CMS and if it helps anyone else out there.

How?
There aren't too many steps but this is what I went through and I might amend this if I see any new issues:

What?
This article is a quick note on how to change your Joomla CMS "Read More" to "Register to Read More" all without hacking away at the Joomla core.

Why?
Well a few hacks may be necessary because not only do we want to restrict read more content (full text) and just show intro texts to public but the default Joomla instructions do not include the search engine. I need the Joomla built-in search engine to also ignore permissions so that the article can still be indexed in global search engines such as Google.

How?
It's been difficult to search for the right words but heres the method to restrict the introtext to the public and fulltext (read more) to the registered users:

Applies to

• Joomla! CMS v3.5.x

What?
This is a short article on how to remove the ID numbers from your Joomla website addresses for search engine friendly URLs.

// What I have
www.joellipman.com/index.php?option=com_content&category_id=4&article_id=123-article-alias

// With URL rewriting enabled
www.joellipman.com/index.php/4-category-alias/123-article-alias.html

// What I want
www.joellipman.com/category-alias/article-alias.html

How?
You could buy an SEF extension that does this for you or spend time tweaking your .htaccess file.  Or you can take advantage of a Joomla update and do this without any coding...

What?
During a site upgrade, the commenting extension for Joomla called JComments would return errors when using PHP version 7. This is a quick article to document what needed doing to fix the errors.

How?

What?
This is a quick article to remind me how to move a Joomla administration section and to lock it down to a specific IP address. The below does not involve installing any third-party extensions and will remain in place even if you update your Joomla CMS.

Why?
When checking audit logs, I sometimes see that my administrator url is accessed more than my front-end. The below has worked for me on Joomla websites in general and prevents the administrator URL showing up at all in the stats (unless you were using it).

Leaving this unchecked means that the crackers/hackers will get through ultimately whether it be by brute-force, DoS, Injection, etc. I'm not saying these are silver bullets, but they will slow down some people.

How?
The below will a) change the /administrator location and b) limit access to a single IP address. Note that you will need to ensure you have a static IP (most ISPs now assign static IPs to home broadband users as well as larger corporations). But just in case you don't have one, let me do this in two stages.

What?
A quick article to remind me about this issue. Not sure whether it is specific to the Joomla Content Management System, but within the Joomla! CMS, an error 1054 comes up if you use the above statement.

Why?
The MySQL statement SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT name) FROM table is valid but I get what you mean and it's sometimes difficult to explain why you want to use it.

How?
Method #1: Add an alias to the field:

What?
This is an article to document the migration of a Joomla! CMS running version 2.5.11 to an instance of Joomla! CMS version 3.4.1. I would consider the below instructions an ALPHA version as it is considered unstable for official use... Saying that this is how I upgraded my own personal website: www.joellipman.com.

This article assumes you are familiar with upgrading a Joomla! CMS and running MySQL statements against your database.

For the purposes of this article, we will refer to the live/current/production website running Joomla v2.5 as "v25" and the new Joomla instance as "v34". Their respective database tables are prefixed with "v25_" and "v34_". So an example MySQL statement will be:

`v25_db`.`v25_tablename`
-- with the database name and table prefix of database you are READING from (eg. `myuser_joellipmancom_mysitedb`.`lkdjf_content`)

`v34_db`.`v34_tablename`
-- with the database name and table prefix of database you are WRITING to (eg. `myuser_joellipmancom_mysitedb`.`ejf1r_content`)

How?
Here's a brief outline of the whole process:

1. Backups
2. Install
3. Users
4. Categories -- unstable
5. Content
6. Weblinks
7. 3rd-party: JComments

What?
So I'm getting an error like this:

The requested page can't be found.
An error has occurred while processing your request.

You may not be able to visit this page because of:
- an out-of-date bookmark/favourite
- a mistyped address
- a search engine that has an out-of-date listing for this site
- you have no access to this page

If difficulties persist, please contact the System Administrator of this site and report the error below.
404 Component not found.

Just because I'm doing something like this:
How?