Joomla! Forum - community, help and support

After update from 3.9.9 to 3.9.26 the menu system on my site www.cosss.co.uk has become unusable. The left hand navigator has two modules 'Main Menu' and 'Resources'. The Resources options generally remains static and this works as before with a consistent list of menu options appearing throughout any navigation of the site. My problems started when I edited a static article for the menu option 'Training Alterations' and found that the old version of the content was being displayed on the site despite clearing browser and site caches etc. I discovered that the menu option was pointing to a new alias which was constructed as the old alias with a '-2' appended to the end. Several other menu items in the Main Menu had also been changed. I wanted to add a new menu item called 'Temp Group Training Times' and in the end had to delete all the menu items in the module and reconstruct them (I called this module New Main Menu to avoid name clashes with the old Main Menu but once happy I had captured all the necessary menu options I deleted the old Main Menu and renamed New Main Menu to Main Menu). Now I'm in a position where selecting an item from the Resources section will display all the items in the Main Menu sometimes but not every time. Clicking the Home option will always display the first few items of the Main Menu with the 'New Main Menu' outdated title for the module. I have run fix database, no change. I now suspect there must be some database corruption/issue but would be grateful for any pointers as to what might be going on.

Is all menu items at the same level or is there Child items?

Children are only shown when the parentes is aktive.

There are children but it’s also 1st level items that go missing as well. This morning from my iPad the menu appears to have refreshed to my rebuilt version and seems to work, leading me to believe that there is some kind of caching issue. I have to add that mobile devices appear to work slightly better than desktop browsers i.e. they show more of the menu items than desktop browsers (safari and chrome on Mac and edge on win10) Also some of my other modules are not displaying now and I need to look at that also. This site has worked for several years with no issue so it’s all a little odd. I’ve upgraded PHP to 7.4 from 7.3 and that has made no difference. I’ve browsed the database and the menu file looks ok to my inexperienced eye.

Your site is delivered via a CDN, can you clear the cache with it and see if it displays correctly?

Yes I've done that. This morning the menus appear to be OK but on trying to make my 'missing' modules appear I am having to set them to appear on All menu options and on one module just now on attempting to save changes in the backend my hosting provider GoDaddy is throwing a cross-site scripting error. Last week they screwed up my security certificate renewal and created a new one and deployed that to their firewall. I am now starting to suspect firewall issues are at play as the reason I upgraded to 3.9.26 was because they wanted to rule that out before they did their job and realised that it was their firewall issue causing my problem (i.e. white screen and no site displayed). So my next port of call is GoDaddy support......

So the cross-site scripting error has been fixed by my whitelisting the website IP address and I can now change my module menu assignments to All and they are now appearing. However I am still clueless as to the root cause of this issue.

You will find few cheerleaders on here for GoDaddy. They do seem to be a common denominator in many issues although cause and effect are not always synonymous.

I am now starting to suspect firewall issues

You site is delivered via the Sucuri Firewall CDN but I think Sucuri was bought by GoDaddy. Are you allowed access to configure that?

You are right it is Securi buy GoDaddy have a website Security dashboard that enables certain parameters to be configured, the whitelist is one of those. I’m sure there are still cacheing issues somewhere, making it difficult to see if changes have worked or not. I’ve changed the global caches from 900 to 60 but not sure how much difference that has made.

abernyte, thank you! You pointed me in the right direction! In the last few days my 'website security deluxe' was renewed, around the same time as I had my SSL certificate issues, I suspect the two are linked.... I researched my hunch about caching and sure enough caching had been enabled on the securi firewall, I've disabled it and bingo the changes I make are now immediately reflected. I've been making changes and then chasing my tail because I didn't think they were working, I had cleared browser cache and changed Joomla caching strategy without even considering it may be a firewall caching issue.

Good work, I am glad you have it sorted. It is always worth remembering that CND's are now fairly common for delivering even small sites where they were once the preserve of the large high bandwidth creations.