sh404SEF 4 Documentation

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RSS/Atom/PDF feeds broken

What happens?

Some Joomla! extensions have an issue which will cause RSS feeds to not work anymore. The symptom is that when trying to view the RSS feed page, which should be an XML file, you are instead shown a regular html page, usually your home page.

The same will happen with Atom feeds and sometimes when an extension is generating a PDF file - such as an invoice.

This comes from a known programming issue found in those extensions.

When does it happen?

IMPORTANT: The RSS/Atom bug only appears when sh404SEF is enabled but is not caused by sh404SEF. If happening with PDF files as well, the bug will occur both with and without sh404SEF.

The reason this is happening only when sh404SEF is enabled is because with sh404SEF, RSS feeds have clean URLs such as https://example.com/blog/feed/rss.

With Joomla URLs, feeds have links such as https://example.com/blog/?format=feed&type=rss and the bug is not triggered.

With PDF, links are similar to https://example.com/shop/invoice-123456.pdf both for Joomla URLs and sh404SEF URLs and so the issue will appear for both Joomla and sh404SEF.

Which extension cause this?

IMPORTANT: this is only a list of extension we know cause the problem because they have been reported to us. There are certainly others that we don't know of. Be sure to report any such similar issue on sh404SEF helpdesk so that we can investigate.

This behavior has been experienced with:

  • eosiris jQuery plugin - version 1.3.9 - August 2015 - see this page for a code fix to apply to this plugin.
  • eosiris Google Analytics plugin - version 1.3.3 - August 2015 - see this page for a code fix to apply to this plugin.
  • OSDownload Pro from Joomlashack - version 1.10.0 - March 2020
  • RegularLabs Modules Anywhere - problem fixed years ago (as of early 2020), can only happen if you run extremely outdated versions.
  • Sobipro - problem fixed years ago (as of early 2020), can only happen if you run extremely outdated versions.
  • a few others we did not properly took note of :(

How to identify the extension causing the problem

In almost all cases, the extension causing the problem is a system plugin. So the steps to identify it are:

  1. Go to Joomla plugins manager
  2. Click on the Search tools button and under the Select Type dropdown selector, select System
  3. Disable all the non-Joomla plugins one after another. After deselecting each plugin, try to reload the RSS/Atom feed page that's not working
  4. Do this until the RSS feed works again: the last plugin you disabled is the one causing the problem
  5. Report the issue to us and to the plugin developer

Although rare, we have seen instances where the same site had two plugins with the same bug. This is why you should disable plugins one after another, not one by one:

  • disable the first plugin
  • disable the second plugin (but leave the first disabled)
  • disable the third plugin (but leave the first and second disabled)
  • ...

How to fix?

The only actual fix is for the extension developer to correct their code. Temporary workaround is to disable the plugin from within Joomla plugins manager.