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I am quite new to website building and this is the first time I am building my own website with Joomla! 1.5.4, with a free template named "lostusflower" obtained from Joomlashack. After reading a few quick tutorials and watching several videos about Joomla! 1.5.4, this is what I have been able to accomplish.
I have two sections, Professional and Personal. The Professional section has these categories: Home, Experience, Skillset, Education, Honors and Contact Me. The Personal section has one category named "My Interests".
I have two menus on the homepage: Main Menu and Top Menu. To test the menu system, I created an article named "My experience" (Section - Professional, Category - Experience) and added this text to it, "Hello, here you will find information about my experience".
I also created a menu item called "Experience" for the top menu, as Category Blog Layout, for the Professional/Experience combination, or in other words, for the Experience category. After these steps, I assumed that when I would click on "Experience" in the top menu, it should lead to me a new page in the same window with the Category Blog Layout and the text, "Hello, here you will find information about my experience", instead, it leads me to a page which says, "404 - Component not found". Why would this happen, what am I missing?
The article about experience appears on the home page instead. When I click on the "Home" menu item in the top menu, I get the same error page. I get the same error page with all the top menu items and the main menu items even after linking them to different articles. The only link which works is the "Home" menu item in the main menu.
I have been struggling with this for one and a half days now and I can't figure out what's wrong. Is it the template itself, or am I doing something wrong?
The template is a free template under the Edit tab for the template, it says "Menus: Cannot assign default templates" under "Menu Assignment" and "The parameter file /templates/lotusflower/params.ini is unwritable!" under "Parameters".
I have edited some parts of the template through the HTML editor for the template (I know very little about PHP and HTML). I went back and read the tutorials again and watched videos, but nothing is lighting a bulb in my head. I would greatly appreciate all help on this issue. I am quite new to all this, so if I missed on providing any critical data to solve this problem please let me know.
I wanted to attach the screenshots of the configurations of the Category Experience, top menu item Experience and the Category Experience Article "My Experience", but there is no "Attach files" button or any other provision of attaching the files.
[edited by: ergophobe at 10:05 pm (utc) on July 16, 2008]
[edit reason] removed URL, highlighted error msgs, formatting [/edit]
I'm not a Joomla users, but a few things come to mind.
1. the error message says that params.ini is unwritable. That might be causing problems.
2. Turn off "clean" URLs for now. In other words, use Joomla's default URLs.
3. Go back to the default template that shipped with Joomla. Get the URLs working, and then go back and make your template edits and every time you edit something, reload the live page and test so you don't get too far down the road before seeing what's wrong.
Also, this thread might help a little in terms of generally how to do troublshooting with PHP.
Use the template provided by Joomla! and test the content creation with it. I think I will install Joomla in a new folder and a database to test the default template. I should mention here that I did make a few changes in the template, like removing the logo name and adding my name, etc., so, isn't it writable in some sense?
If it is the template that may be causing problems, I wonder of what use it is, if it can't link menus and articles. I am still seeking more help on these issues.
Thanks,
SC
/templates/lotusflower/params.ini
Just for testing, make it world writeable (chmod 777) and see if that helps. Don't leave it world writeable obviously.
