Strange problem with menu items and SEF URLs

[Anne Campbell]

Hi all,

I'm helping Joanne Pinatel with a site that she's migrating from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5, and we're having a very strange problem with menu items and SEF URLs. On the right-hand side, there's an accordion menu module, and for some reason, the SEF URLs of *some* of the menu items have changed in the migration process. 

If you look at the original 1.5 site and click "Membership" on the right, you'll see several pages underneath:

http://hrymca.org/

The first is "Why Join the Y," with this URL: http://hrymca.org/membership/why-join-the-y.html

Then if you look at the new 2.5 site and click Membership, you'll see the same pages, but the URLs are different:

http://hrymca.org/joomla25/

If you look at "Why Join the Y," the URL is: http://hrymca.org/joomla25/membership-rightMenu/why-join-the-y.html

And this gives a 404 Not Found. 

For some reason, Joomla is appending that -rightMenu suffix in the middle of the URL, but only for the pages under Membership. We have triple-checked the Membership category, the articles, the menu items, the menu itself, and the menu module to make sure that none of them is supposed to be adding a "-rightMenu" to the middle of the URL. "rightMenu" is the name of the menu, but there's no reason in the world why that should be in the URL of some of the menu items (the Membership ones) and not others. 

It's not an issue with the special accordion module - the same thing happens with a plain, core Joomla menu.

Now, here's where it gets very weird. Every time we try to create a new menu item in any menu, and try to choose the Menu Item Type, we get this error message at the top of the list of menu item types: 

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: /home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/components/com_workforce/views/iconuploader/metadata.xml:4: parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: view line 3 and metadata in /home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/administrator/components/com_menus/models/menutypes.php on line 206

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: </metadata> in /home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/administrator/components/com_menus/models/menutypes.php on line 206

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: ^ in /home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/administrator/components/com_menus/models/menutypes.php on line 206

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: /home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/components/com_workforce/views/iconuploader/metadata.xml:4: parser error : Premature end of data in tag metadata line 2 in /home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/administrator/components/com_menus/models/menutypes.php on line 206

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: </metadata> in /home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/administrator/components/com_menus/models/menutypes.php on line 206

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: ^ in /home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/administrator/components/com_menus/models/menutypes.php on line 206

Underneath all those warnings, I'm still able to choose a menu item type and continue on. I've taken a look at that menutypes.php file the errors are referring to, and at first glance, it looks fine. I even downloaded a fresh copy of Joomla 2.5 and compared the original file with the copy on the Y site, and I don't see any differences that are obvious. 

Lastly, when I finish the process of creating new menu items, Joomla seems to add the current date and time into the URL of the menu item! Here's an example: 

http://hrymca.org/joomla25/2012-07-10-17-43-36/why-join-the-y-test

But when I view the menu item in the back end, the Alias is simply "why-join-the-y-test," with no date in there. 

What on earth?! I've never seen this happen before, and I have no idea why it would. The site works fine when I turn off SEF URLs, but we'd of course rather get them working properly.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

-Anne

--
Anne Campbell, in...@annecampbelldesign.com
http://www.annecampbelldesign.com/
http://www.riverbenddoula.com/

[Matt Thomas]

Hi Anne,

How did you all do the migration? Jupgrade, SPugrade... etc ?

Best,

Matt Thomas

Founder betweenbrain™

Lead Developer Construct Template Development Framework

Phone: 203.632.9322
Twitter: @betweenbrain

Github: https://github.com/betweenbrain

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[Anne Campbell]

Matt wrote:

How did you all do the migration? Jupgrade, SPugrade... etc ?

Joanne used SP Upgrade. I'm not 100% sure this issue is related to the migration, though - Joanne, can you tell us more about exactly when and how you noticed the problem?

[Andrea Tarr at Tarr Consulting]

THis is where I would look:

/home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/components/com_workforce/views/iconuploader/metadata.xml:4: parser error : Premature end of data in tag metadata line 2 in 

Check under components/com_workforce/views/iconuploader/metadata:xml. I bet you have something funny in there.

Andy

Andrea Tarr

Tarr Consulting

www.tarrconsulting.com

[Joanne Pinatel]

I installed Joomla 2.5 in the staging directory. Then I installed SP Upgrade and followed the migration directions. Everything seemed to migrate fine. I only noticed the menu acting wonky after I installed the extension and tested it with the existing menu items.

 

Joanne

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[Matt Thomas]

I agree with Andrea that it sounds like the issue us with com_workforce, namely components/com_workforce/views/iconuploader/metadata.xml

Best,

Matt Thomas

Founder betweenbrain™

Lead Developer Construct Template Development Framework

Phone: 203.632.9322
Twitter: @betweenbrain

Github: https://github.com/betweenbrain

[Joanne Pinatel]

Maybe we should just uninstall Work Force? We can use something else if that extension is a problem.

 

Joanne

 

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[Andrea Tarr at Tarr Consulting]

You could uninstall it and see if the problem goes away. It could be a bad download, a corrupted file, or a bug from workforce.

[Joanne Pinatel]

Just out of curiosity, how did you both figure out the problem might be with Work Force? Did you run something that showed you where the errors were?

[Andrea Tarr at Tarr Consulting]

In Anne's original message she listed the error messages. They were mostly from com_menu which is a core Joomla component. The only error message not in core was the one with the workforce file in it.

Actual error messages can be really good things :) They can look weird and incomprehensible, but if you ignore what you don't understand and look at the rest you can sometimes pick out really good clues.

[Andrea Tarr at Tarr Consulting]

Which isn't to so that a bug might not be in Joomla itself, but since we hadn't come across that particular bug yet, it makes sense to look at what was different. That type of bug would have likely shown up earlier if it were in core.

Andy

Andrea Tarr

Tarr Consulting

www.tarrconsulting.com

On Jul 10, 2012, at 4:38 PM, Joanne Pinatel wrote:

[Joanne Pinatel]

That’s really smart! I didn’t even look at the error messages – I just saw error error error…

 

Thanks

 

J

[Anne Campbell]

Andy wrote:

THis is where I would look:

/home/vg008web06/44/94/2909444/web/joomla25/components/com_workforce/views/iconuploader/metadata.xml:4: parser error : Premature end of data in tag metadata line 2 in 

Check under components/com_workforce/views/iconuploader/metadata:xml. I bet you have something funny in there.

Once again you've saved the day! We uninstalled Work Force, and that eliminated all the error messages when choosing the menu item type. 

As for the other weird bug, with Joomla adding the date and time to the SEF URLs, I got a clue from this forum thread:

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=624&t=628224

The problem was that, in setting up the accordion navigation, we had some menu items with the item type "External URL," with the URL set to "#". This was so that you could click on the main headings and have the accordion expand to show what was underneath. Apparently Joomla 2.5 deals with external URL menu items differently than 1.5 did, and so all the sub-menu items were given a strange SEF URL with the date and time appended to it. 

Instead of External URLs, we're now just using Text Separators, and they work fine! 

Thanks so much to Andy and Matt for your help with debugging.