Little Helper - Support FAQ

This document explains the potential issues you could face using Joomla Little Helper, gives you pointers to learn more and provides a quick solution to all the issues we know of.

Errors with Joomla Little Helper Security - .htaccess - SEF - security

Joomla! .htaccess errors are often solved with Joomla Little Helper security features; here is a list to help you diagnose Joomla htaccess errors. If you are installing Joomla Little Helper to fix your existing .htaccess errors, don't worry: your original .htaccess files will be backed up so you can come back later, once the site is up, and introduce your original rules.

Joomla .htaccess 500 Error - Internal Server Error

This is the worst you can get, but it's easy to solve.  This error can occur if some of your hosting provider options conflict with the default .htaccess file in the root of your Joomla installation.

This could also prevent the use of the administrator, so the quick solution is: login to your host and manually delete the .htaccess file.

Joomla Little Helper tests the files before it installs them, so this should never really happen.

Quick fix for .htaccess error

Both the Joomla and the boilerplate .htaccess files are well documented inline.  Joomla Little Helper handles automatically the single most frequent problem instruction:

Options +FollowSymlinks

This line is often the cause of apache Internal server error 500. Joomla Little Helper automatically comments it if necessary:

#Options +FollowSymlinks

Antivirus reports a virus in LittleHelper

The clean cache function attempts to use a system call (rm -rf) which is safely invoked (no user input is passed to it) through one of the following calls: exec, passthrough, system. Some antiviruses don't like this approach and flag it as suspicious / viral code. The code contains a fourth option, which is deleting with php iteration. However the quick approach is left intentionally: on a high-traffic site, it is necessary to use system calls otherwise the cache gets filled again while we're emptying it. As of version 2.3.2 the "dangerous" functions have been isolated in a separated file; it has been whitelisted so this should not be an issue as of February, 2015.

Change the administrator login logo

Find the system/littlehelper plugin, set it to use a custom logo and upload /choose your image. Hover over the label to see the correct size for your template (isis = 256*53, hathor = 150*137)

Some images are no longer visible

Maybe some custom (and against best practices) extension is using some php in the images folder. You can remove the LittleHelpers' .htaccess pressing the "x" button next to it in administrator/components/Little Helper under the tab security (on the "images" row), this will restore the default.

You have trouble installing new extensions

(...or some other functionality is hindered): I can't think of a reason .htaccess could prevent this. The tmp folder is prohibited from running .php file as a security measure. You can remove this functionality by using the "x" icon on the right side of the tmp .htaccess file (but Joomla! doesn't require this).

The site fails after reload

You might have protected the cache folder as well: this comes into play when the content is served from cache, so typically you would experience this after a site reload. Simply remove the cache .htaccess

Erros with Trash & Cache

I accidentally emptied the recycle bin

Before performing the actual delete, we make a backup (just in case...).

You will find the backups under

/tmp/recycle_bin_backup

along with a readme with instructions on how to restore backups.  The backups are in standard .sql format (you can reimport them with the command line mysql program or with phpmyadmin and the like.

Could not empty trash for... Asset not found?

The full error message may look like:

Could not empty trash for categories, id: 
10,15,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,9,14,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,72,73,75,76,78
 Asset not found?

This is raised after Joomla Table delete fails.  The categories are most likely missing an asset_id, or their asset_id points to a non-existing record, which means you won't be able to delete them using Joomla! either.  You may delete them only with direct database access, using the id list provided in the error message.

Errors with Icons, Favicons, Apple precomposed icons

The new favicon doesn't show

You browser will not automatically detect the new icon; cleaning the cache is the quickest solution. Else add a ?random=something to the favicon's href.

The new icons don't show on Android / iPhone etc.

The markup to add the precomposed needs to be manually added to your template; before you change your template's index.php file, check if they are not inserted already.  The toomanyfiles plugin takes care of this too (but you need to enable this functionality)