Login to Joomla Administrator Not Working and No Error Is Displayed

Login to Joomla Administrator Not Working and No Error Is Displayed

 

Yesterday we had a client that told us that he was unable to login to his Joomla website. He told us that everytime he tries to login, he gets redirected back to the login page with no error! Since he was a technical person, he told us that he did a research on the subject and the thinks that it’s the session.savepath Joomla problem. This made sense because Joomla uses the built-in PHP $_SESSION superglobal variable to maintain information about the logged in person and if it can’t save that information to the session, then it won’t be able to login the person.

So, the first thing we tried to do was to check whether sessions were actually working on the site, and they were (we set a session variable in one page and we retrieved in another page) – so that takes care of our client’s theory of why the problem is happening.

Our second attempt was to check the ACL (Access Control List) of the website as this problem is often associated with incorrect ACL. So we logged in to phpMyAdmin, we selected the database of his Joomla website, and we checked it and it was all clean: the tables jos_users, jos_usergroups, jos_user_usergroup_map, and jos_viewlevels were all OK. We then checked the specific entries in the table jos_assets that might affect the login process, and all these entries were fine.

We then tried to do things a bit differently, since our customer was a technical person, he made a backup for the website (the backup consisted of the filesystem and the database) before the problem happened and immediately after the problem happened. So, what we did was that we extracted the database from both backups and started comparing the database of the working website with that of the non-working website. There were about 20 differences – all of them were trivial, with the exception of a very small difference in one of the INSERT lines (the difference is in red):

INSERT line in the working version:

INSERT INTO `jos25_extensions` (`extension_id`, `name`, `type`, `element`, `folder`, `client_id`, `enabled`, `access`, `protected`, `manifest_cache`, `params`, `custom_data`, `system_data`, `checked_out`, `checked_out_time`, `ordering`, `state`) VALUES
(432, 'plg_user_joomla', 'plugin', 'joomla', 'user', 0, 1, 1, 0, '{"legacy":false,"name":"plg_user_joomla","type":"plugin","creationDate":"December 2006","author":"Joomla! Project","copyright":"(C) 2005 - 2009 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.","authorEmail":"admin@joomla.org","authorUrl":"www.joomla.org","version":"2.5.0","description":"PLG_USER_JOOMLA_XML_DESCRIPTION","group":""}', '{"autoregister":"1"}', '', '', 0, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', 2, 0);

INSERT line in the non-working version:

INSERT INTO `jos25_extensions` (`extension_id`, `name`, `type`, `element`, `folder`, `client_id`, `enabled`, `access`, `protected`, `manifest_cache`, `params`, `custom_data`, `system_data`, `checked_out`, `checked_out_time`, `ordering`, `state`) VALUES
(432, 'plg_user_joomla', 'plugin', 'joomla', 'user', 0, 0, 1, 0, '{"legacy":false,"name":"plg_user_joomla","type":"plugin","creationDate":"December 2006","author":"Joomla! Project","copyright":"(C) 2005 - 2009 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.","authorEmail":"admin@joomla.org","authorUrl":"www.joomla.org","version":"2.5.0","description":"PLG_USER_JOOMLA_XML_DESCRIPTION","group":""}', '{"autoregister":"1"}', '', '', 0, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', 2, 0);

As you can see, there is a “1? in the first line that is a “0? in the first line, and guess what – that was the cause of the whole problem. You see, that little 1 was telling Joomla that the user plugin was enabled and that all user activity should work normally. The 0 in the non-working version was telling Joomla to disable the user plugin, and that’s why logins where not working on the Joomla site and no errors were returned. Changing that value back to 1 fixed the whole problem.

So why did that happen?

We think that there are two reasons of why that happened:

    Someone manually disabled the user plugin on the Joomla website.

    A (badly written) extension mistakenly disabled the userplugin. Our preliminary investigation on this issue leads to believe that this extension might be the userport extension.

If you have the problem where you’re trying to login to your Joomla backend and you’re getting redirected to the login screen, and if this post did not help you (or if it’s a bit too technical for you) then all you need to do is to contact us. We will respond immediately, we will fix your website as soon as we can, and we won’t charge you much!