I would later find out it was a couple plugins we had installed that caused the problem, but by that time I had already started the long process of rebuilding and was too far in to turn back.

Anyway back to $mosConfig_live_site. In the process of trying to get our site back to where it had been before the update I started to have trouble with the clean URL’s. We are running the latest versions of Joomla!, Viertuemart and OpenSEF. Once the SEF URL’s were activate everything seemed to work ok until you hit the ‘checkout’ button on our store. Then somewhere in the SSL redirect things went wrong and it would end up dumping the cart contents and leaving the user stranded on a secure version of the home page. I puzzled over this for days, posted to a couple forums and lost some sleep.

Then it hit me. I noticed that the any relative links would redirect the user to the non-www version of the site. So for example: if you went to www.domain.com and then clicked on a link it would take you to domain.com/link-url/ rather than www.domain.com/link-url/. So I knew I had the root URL wrong somewhere, but the variable that determines that value ($mosConfig_live_site) I believe is set in the installation process and is not visible anywhere in the administrative side of Joomla. It’s located in the configuration.php file located in the installation root.

Sure enough I had set $mosConfig_live_site to http://domain.com rather than http://www.domain.com. I added the ‘www’ and the checkout process worked like a charm with the clean URL’s enabled.

Recently I was looking to create some content pages using Joomla!’s article setup. The idea was to create ‘articles’ about certain products to be used for landing pages. These pages would have product specific information which was already contained in the Virtuemart database. I thought it relatively silly and un-DRY to have to recreate the content in this new page when it already existed in another part of the site. Not to mention the hassle of having to make sure the two remained consistent (such as prices or product names).

Normally I would just write some PHP/MySQL to handle this but of course that isn’t allowed natively within a Joomla! article and for good reason. Fortunately I found two Joomla! Extensions that do the trick nicely.

RunPHP

This allows you to write PHP right in the article by wrapping it in {runphp}{/runphp} tags. This is super handy and works great. I’m able to pull data from my Virtuemart database and drop it right into the article, as well as have more conditional control over different aspects of the article content.

MosSnippet

This Mambot is neat because it allows you to use multiple languages and markups with standard syntax (as opposed to RunPHP which obviously only works with PHP).   The only drawback is that you have to pre-write these snippets in the administrative side of this Mambot before you can use them in your article.  So you write your code and save it as a snippet in the Mambot (you have 15 slots available by default) and then you can call it in your article by using {snippet name} replacing ‘name’ with the actual name of your snippet.  This works well if you have a snippet of code you use repeatedly (such as dynamic tracking code perhaps?) and is nice because you can use multiple programming languages.