My first site was in Joomla 1.5. I only used the simplest structure - no categories, and no blogs. Just articles attached to menu items.
On the occasion of migrating to J4 - the site migrated fine - I decided to add Categories and a Blog for each one. Fiasco. This is an inherited J1.5 problem would you believe.
The solution is to be found on the Joomla Forum here: https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=672782.
Scroll down to to th fith before last entry which reads:
For me, the problem was that the first entry (id = 1) in the #__categories table was a com_contact entry, not a system entry.
So I deleted this one and recreated the root entry:
id: 1
rgt: 33
extension: system
title: ROOT
alias: root
published: 1
params: {}
language: *
All categories need to refer to THIS root entry as the parent, and not a com_contact entry (or anything else).
MattLG
I applied this removing the "com_contact" entry. And as advertised all works well when creating blogs. I had previously turned OFF Search Engine Friendly URLs.
When updating a later site, I had to do exactly the same. Also in this later site the #__Menu table was missing the field "extension", but this does not seem to matter.
I have had to delete a few article items from the menu and recreate as they "un-published themselves". It seems anything that was realted to a blog ought to be Trashed. Then Empty the Trash and Rebuild. Even when re-creating, I find that I have to to do as follows:
- Create the Item and makes its parent item the root.
- If it is still unpublished make it's position First, and Publish
- Then move it into the blog.
- If it is still unpublished, make it First [in the Blog] and Publish
- Then move it to the right position.
Noted that using "Last" to position a "self unpublishing" item fails.
I also got an error as follows: "BIGINT UNSIGNED value is out of range in '`2_rtr_310_a`.`#__menu`.`level` + -1'"
Not an expert, but I examined the "params" field [the only one with the word "level" in it] in the __menu table and could not see anything untoward ....
See here for the result - http://rgtr.tdocplus.co.uk/.