It was not JCE - Advanced Editor causing the Problem

I was having a lot of problems with JCE an advanced editor for Joomla. I actually thought JCE had broken TinyMCE but, that was not the case at all. Both worked fine with my last hosting company, so I was starting to think I was missing some type of PHP software. But, when Joomla installed it stated in had all it needed to work.

I was getting the following at the top of a blank pop-up in TinyMCE, {$lang_insert_link_title} {$lang_insert_image_title}. It even got stranger when I tried to make a simple link it would open my site login page! This was happening to all the installations of Joomla that I had done over the last few days, about 6 installs. The solution to my problem not only fixed the Joomla built-in editor, it also fixed JCE. Now, I don't know a great deal about the built in editor but I do think JCE depends on it working right.

JCE is the best advanced editor for Joomla, in my opinion, whether commercial or opensource. The new 1.1 beta 2 version out as of Dec.2006 looks good and appears to work well. Trying to use Joomla without an advanced editor like JCE makes life very difficult. Ryan has put a huge amount of work into this high quality opensource advanced editor for Joomla.

Personally, I subscribed at Ryan's website, which is about $ 20.00 a year. This helps Ryan out a little with his costs involved in supplying us with this excellent feature rich advanced editor at no charge. By subscribing you also received 3 advanced plugins for the JCE editor. Media Manager SE, Advanced Links SE and a trick Caption plugin. Well worth the few dollars Ryan hopes to bring in to help cover bandwidth charges from traffic to his JCE site.

The solution is a rather simple one. Open your Joomla configuration file (PHP) and find your domain name. Look about halfway down the page and add the WWW (lowercase as a rule) to your domain name. This may fix your problems with JCE or Tiny MCE. In my case, no editor would work until I made this change. Install and use JoomXplorer component, which is an excellent tool for managing your files. It may also be the ONLY way you can edit or change file permissions.

( Updated March 2009, Once we got a new dedicated server with the correct settings and set up by professionals we no longer deal with file permission issues. If you are still experience file permission issues or have to use 777 your server is not set up correctly to run Joomla and likely any PHP or MySQL database type site .)

It should be noted that this issue has never happened again during any installations of Joomla or JCE. This happened a few months ago before a couple of upgrades of both products. JCE is an excellent advanced editor and Ryan looks after people who are using his opensource software.

 June 2008 Updated

This article is very outdated and I hope you are not using the older version of JCE listed here. The JC Editor component for Joomla 1.0.15 and the newer version 1.53 has come a long way from JCE 1.1 beta 2!