Why Your Joomla Site Stopped Working

Article Ordering in Joomla 3

We have clients whose Joomla sites were built as far back as 2010… and are somehow still alive and thriving. That’s an incredible lifespan for a website with zero updates and the digital equivalent of “thoughts and prayers” for maintenance. It's also a huge contrast to our Wordpress websites, that have a much shorter lifespan without any attention.

We've even seen way fewer security problems with Joomla. It's basically that low maintenance friend who drinks water, minds their business and never ends up in drama. Unfortunately, the internet does not care about Joomla's low drama lifestyle. 

Joomla 3 reached end of life in 2023. That's a nice way of saying that it's dead. The wizards at Joomla are no longer releasing fixes, updates or security patches for Joomla 3. Good luck out there.

What Broke Joomla Article Ordering?

Recently our web host (and a lot of web hosts) made an update to PHP to keep things fast and secure. Joomla reacted to this unexpected change the way most of us do: poorly.

Article ordering that was previously controlled by the "Joomla Order" is now being ignored. Articles are ordered by article number instead. This is not ideal for many reasons, the first being that you have no control over the article number since it is auto-generated when you create an article.

If you've been experiencing this problem with Joomla 3 then it's not just you! Almost all of the Joomla 3 sites in our portfolio have been victimized by this update.

The Date Workaround

Assuming the articles you are trying to order are not in a custom component, then you should be able to work around the issue. It's not elegant and it's totally annoying, but it can be done.

• Go to your menu item
• Change Article Ordering from "Joomla Order" to something else. We like "Oldest to Newest"
• Then, manually re-date each article creation date in the order you want them to appear (do this in the article "publishing" tab.

It's not ideal to time travel your content into submission, but it does work if you're in a pinch.

Updating from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4

Unfortunately, there was a big upset in the Joomla world when they updated from 3 to 4. The upgrade wasn't really an upgrade... it was more of a "Surprise, you must re-build your entire website!" situation. This is why many of our websites have been stuck in Joomla 3 for much longer than intended. Because re-building your entire website isn't exactly a casual, low-cost activity.

But in reality we are now on Joomla 6. So your Joomla 3 website is a flip phone at this point. You should update your Joomla version because:

• It's more secure
• You can keep your existing website design and save a little money by doing so
• Your website will be supported with updates and patches
• It's easier to make changes to websites with modern backends, so if you're planning a new section or considering adding functionality, you may need to update your Joomla version anyway.
• Future you will not be mad at present you.

We can also put you on a maintenance plan so you're not in this exact situation again in five years.

The internet move fast. You should plan to update your website every 5 years. If you get more life out of it than that, amazing! You've beat the system.

If your Joomla site is starting to act a little haunted, let's chat! We can help patch things up, guide you through a re-build or offer emotional support. We do have some low cost alternatives that won't make you want to throw your laptop into the ocean.