Joomla - JUser: :_load: Unable to load user with ID: 62

Issue occurred after migrating website from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5 (using SP Upgrade). When admin user was logged-on in the front end, on some pages following error was displayed:

Problem was caused by checked-out articles. As users were not migrated using SP Upgrade (website had only one user) checked out articles were marked as being checked out by super administrator from old 1.5 website (UserID 62), which didn't exist on the new Joomla installation.

Solution was to unlock all locked (checked out) articles. This can be done either manually in the back end, or if you have lots of articles, running following SQL statement against Joomla database (using phpMyAdmin or similar):

 
UPDATE 'uytox_content'
SET checked_out = 0
WHERE checked_out = 62
 

Where:
uytox_ Joomla DB table prefix.
62 - old Joomla 1.5 website user ID

Redirect "component/content/?view=featured" to your home page

I've had this issue with some brand new Joomla websites. One of the first URLs Google indexes is www.yoursite.com/component/content/?view=featured.

In addition to a weird URL, following this link often opens your website without navigation or some other components. While this normally gets resolved after a while without any action (Google updates its index), as a temporary workaround you can use .htaccess file to redirect /component/content/?view=featured to your home page. Simply add flowing code to your .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^view=featured$
RewriteRule ^component/content/$ http://www.yoursite.com/? [L,R=301]

Joomla - add separator between articles on front page

If you want to add a separator between your Joomla home page featured articles, add following text to your template's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file:

 
.item-separator {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #898989; 
display: block; 
height:5px; 
margin: 10px 0; 
width: 100%;
}
 

Adjust parameters to match your website design.

Change default article sort order in Joomla back end

By default Joomla sorts articles by title, which may be fine in some instances, however, most of the time people prefer to have them sorted by date with latest articles at the top. Normally, to do this you would have to click on Date heading twice.

There is no built-in option to change default sort order, but this can be achieved by making a small change to one Joomla core file.