If clicking the button 'Send Test Email' ends up in an error message or the test email does not arrive, it is possible to debug the mail function and find out what is wrong. Follow these Joomla tutorials to get a detailed log, consisting of the SMTP connection dialogue and all the status codes. If the reason for the failure is a mystery, create a topic at the Joomla Support Forum and copy and paste the log file for the volunteer Joomla experts to study and give their advice.

Please note that Joomla 3 and Joomla 4 send the test email to the email address specified in the field 'From Email' in the Mail section of the Global Configuration,, a few lines up from the Send Test Mail button, whereas Joomla 5 and Joomla 6 send the test email to the email address of the logged-in Super User. That makes sense, because  it allows you to test different email addresses, but remember to change your email address back after the test.

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Written by: Toivo Talikka

Category: Joomla

Published: 08 June 2025

Hits: 173

Would you like to create a module to display some statistics from another Joomla site, hosted in the same server? That is perfectly possible and relatively simple, by using the Joomla database connection to an external database.

A proof of concept module, Databases, can be downloaded from https://extensions.talikka.com/downloads/databases/mod_databases-1.0.0.zip

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Written by: Toivo Talikka

Category: Joomla

Published: 01 September 2024

Hits: 12997

This example displays three user custom fields, fielda, fieldb and fieldc.  It uses the PHP function array_column() and therefore it does not need a foreach loop.

use Joomla\CMS\Factory;
use Joomla\Component\Fields\Administrator\Helper\FieldsHelper;
$customFields = FieldsHelper::getFields('com_users.user', Factory::getUser(), true);
$values = array_column($customFields, 'value', 'name');
// echo 'values = ' . print_r($values, true);
echo 'fielda = ' . $values['fielda'] . ' fieldb = ' . $values['fieldb'] . ' fieldc = ' . $values['fieldc'];

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Written by: Toivo Talikka

Category: Joomla

Published: 08 January 2023

Hits: 23970

You may have seen the error message "JUser: :_load: Unable to load user" and wondered if it would be possible to easily update all articles that display an error after the author or editor of the article has been deleted from the system on purpose or by accident.  The alternative, manual editing and updating each article, even though easy, can be boring and subject to mistakes, and it can take longer than expected.

If you have the numeric id of another user, who is going to replace the author or modifier of the article, the updates can be done through a SQL query.

Run the attached SQL statement first in a test environment, for example a cloned copy of  the website, hosted on your workstation, using a bundle like Wampserver from https://wampserver.aviatechno.net/.  Make a backup of the content table before the test, in case something goes wrong.

The attached SQL script replaces the author of all articles created by the deleted original user, whose name and other details cannot be found from the users table in the database.  The first SQL statement sets the user id of the new author.  After that a CREATE statement creates a temporary table  so that the article ids can be stored by the subsequent query, which finds all the articles where the author has been deleted and adds the article id to a temporary table. 

The same pattern can be used to update the column 'modified_by'. Replace 'ep28r' with your own table prefix.

SET @author = 181;
DROP TEMPORARY TABLE IF EXISTS deleted_users;
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE deleted_users (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)
SELECT c.id FROM ep28r_content c
LEFT JOIN ep28r_users u ON c.created_by = u.id
WHERE u.id IS NULL;
UPDATE ep28r_content c SET c.created_by = @author
WHERE c.id IN(SELECT d.id FROM deleted_users d);

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Written by: Toivo Talikka

Category: Joomla

Published: 12 January 2020

Hits: 42219