Joomla Resources

A 500 error on a brand-new Joomla install is one of the most disorienting problems a first-time self-hoster can hit: there's no Joomla error message to read, no log entry that points at Joomla itself, and every guide online assumes you already have a working site. If you're setting up Joomla on your own Linux server for the first time and you're stuck staring at a blank 500 page, here's how to actually isolate the cause instead of guessing your way through it.

Still running RokSprocket? Its development stopped after Joomla 3, so it won't work on Joomla 4, 5, or 6 - and it's usually the one extension holding a site back from upgrading. Here's the modern, maintained alternative, and how to switch in minutes.

A lot of Joomla sites run fine until the database gets big: thousands of articles, hundreds of thousands of related rows, and suddenly peak-hour load times creep up even with caching turned on and unused extensions removed. The usual advice ("enable caching, trim plugins") isn't wrong, but it treats the symptom. If your database is genuinely large, the fix has to happen closer to the database itself — starting with where Joomla stores its session data.

Joomla's core System - HTTP Headers plugin makes it easy to switch on several important security headers without touching server config files. But its coverage has real edges: two commonly requested headers are missing entirely, and one setting - the CSP nonce length - looks odd until you see the code behind it.

A site owner ran Joomla 5, kept it patched, and sat behind a WAF configured at a strict paranoia level. It still got hacked. Here's exactly how the attacker got in, why a WAF alone wasn't enough to stop it, and the concrete steps that would have.

Mystery spam that looks like it comes from your Joomla site is almost always your own forms being abused as a relay, not a full compromise. Here's how to find the leak and shut it for good.