Question Joomla Toolkit Issue or working as expected?

[Borderline Digital]

Hey Everyone, new here, new to Plesk, new to a whole lot of things. Please forgive me if I am not explaining myself well.

I've installed the Joomla Toolkit in Plesk, and it works as expected when creating a new site. I'm actually impressed with the ease of use, and very much like how it operates. BUT... there is always a but, BUT when searching for an existing Joomla installation it finds it as it should, except the instance card isn't completely functional. It shows the correct status in the "info" area regarding Core/Extensions/Health etc, if they are out of date, or down... but not in the respective tabs.

For example, clicking the extensions tab results in no extensions showing, even though it shows they need to be updated. When clicking extensions it spins the progress wheel for quite some time, and then says "Looks like there is nothing here". Even more strange is on an instance that was manually installed, I CAN install new plugins from the extensions tab in JTK and it does install the extension properly in Joomla... it just does not show it on the extensions tab. Always says nothing to see...

I've also noticed that when I collapse the cards, on instances that were manually searched for and added; under the "Administrator" heading is has a link that says "open backend" vs "Administrator Login" on instances that were automatically installed with JTK.

So my question is... is it a bug, or is there a difference in how the extension works when automatically installed with JTK, or manually added to JTK? If sites are added manually, they just don't get all the features as an instance that was installed using JTK?

My knowledge is quite limited with this stuff... if it doesn't work correctly out of the box, I'm in a pickle! haha I have tried removing and re-adding JTK and any other menial thing I could think to do with my limited knowledge...

Thoughts?
Brock

 

[Viktor Vogel]

Hey Brock,

First of all, thank you for your praise. I'm happy that you like the Joomla! Toolkit!

Everything that you've described is expected behaviour.

The toolkit only displays extensions with extension IDs higher than 10.000. So, the IDs in the database have been set "incorrectly" in your existing installation. You can simply go to the database and check the field extension_id in the x_extensions table (x is your database prefix). I assume it is an old installation that you've updated (or even upgraded for a previous major core version) to the latest version within the Joomla! 3.x branch, right?

Let me quickly explain the number 10.000: This is the default behaviour of all supported Joomla! versions in the Joomla! Toolkit. The lower numbers (IDs) are reserved for core extensions. This number is set automatically in the supported version as the so-called AUTO_INCREMENT value for the extension_id field. It is the only way for the Joomla! Toolkit to differentiate the core from the 3rd party extensions. In your case, Joomla! did not set the required AUTO_INCREMENT number as it sets it in all supported Joomla! versions (they should be all lower than 10.000 in your instance).

What can you do? You open the database using phpMyAdmin, go to the x_extensions table and set the AUTO_INCREMENT value to 10.000 (select x_extensions table -> click Operations tab -> set the value in the Table options section). Then all newly installed extensions will be listed in the extensions tab. It means that you can reinstall the already installed extension to make them visible for the toolkit. You could also change the IDs of existing extensions manually, but be careful, they might have dependencies, and you could break the functionality (always create a backup first).

The automatic backend login is only possible for found instances if you map a Super User account in the "Settings" tab. Open the mentioned tab and read the description:

"Assign an existing administrator account to this instance to activate the Automatic Login functionality. You can update the password for the specified user account with the help of the password field. Note: You must use an existing user account."

Have success!

 

[Borderline Digital]

Hey Viktor,
Thanks for the detailed response and explanation! It very much makes sense, I’m just not sure I can wrap my head around a simple fix yet.

I’m moving 100+ Joomla sites from a server running cPanel to Plesk. A quick manual transfer of the files and a db dump are simple enough, and JTK makes it easy enough to find the instances available once on the new server.

My issue is that most, if not all of these sites started their lives at various versions of Joomla, and have simply been updated as needed. I’m fairly certain they are all 3.9+, but aside from that, they will all vary. None of this was created by me, I’m just jumping in in the middle!

Navigating to a db and changing the Auto Increment setting is easy enough, as I’d do that just before I export everything. That’ll ensure once the instance is added, at least any new extensions will be visible.

My problem arrives at how to modify/change the existing extensions. You mentioned I could manually update, but it’s likely to break things (and it does, I checked haha) so thats not much of an option. I did manage to find all the of various db fields to change. I can confirm that if I do change all of the extensions specific ID’s + 10,000 everywhere in the db, so that they do match in all tables, it will work… but thats a giant job! I’m not sure thats feasible for this migration!


Correct me if I misunderstood, but I got the impression that simply reinstalling the same Joomla extensions again after the Auto Increment change would give a new updated extension ID, thus appearing in the extensions tab in JTK? You can see in the attached screen shot… RSForms was installed before the Auto Increment setting was changed, and StageIt afterwards. At the time of the screen shot, I had just reinstalled RSForms, and the extension ID did not change. So did I misunderstand that reinstalling is supposed to change the extension ID’s?

I didn’t uninstall RSForms for this test, I only reinstalled and overwrote after the Auto Increment was changed, resulting in no ID change.

That sure could make things difficult if I had make so many manual modification on each site. Is there any way of updating the ID’s before the db dump is created? Something that all the experts (which is clearly not me) are able to go “oh yeah, no problem, type this….”, or am I in for a LOT of work? Haha

Thanks so much for your time!

Brock