The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

The black theme and layout are going to be around for awhile. I think they strike a decent balance between legibility and presentation of the material.

Joomla continues to confound me with amazingly stupid things that they've done on top of an otherwise very solid system. Case in point: Favicons. Those little icons that appear to the left of "http://" in the address bar of a web browser.

This is gonna get a bit thick if you don't know anything about putting together a web site.

The preferred method for linking to favicons in Joomla is to replace the favicon from the default template-folder with your own favicon.ico file. The problem with this method is that there's an informal tradition of putting favicons at the root level of a site (/var/www/html/) or in an images folder (/var/www/html/images). There's much talk about this in the forums and in such cases where you'd want to link to a favicon that's not in the template folder, the recommendation is to add a standard <link> tag in the home page's index.php file that links to the preferred favicon file.

Since I already had a favicon at the root level of this site, I thought it simplest just to add that link in the index file. Afterwards, however, I observed that in WebKit-based browsers like Safari the default Joomla favicon was all that appeared and in Mozilla/Firefox the favicon would briefly show up as the Joomla icon and then blink and refresh to display my own favicon. (I didn't check using IE.) This was a real WTF observation.

With a lot of Googling, I discovered that in addition to the favicon referred to in a template's code and in the index page, there was one more place where favicons were referred to and it was injecting code into my page to display the default favicon from the template folder ahead of the <link> tag that I had added. The culprit was the html.php file in the /libraries/joomla/html/ folder.

The html.php code does a check for a favicon present in either the template folder or at the root level of the site and if it finds a favicon file in either place then it alters the transmitted header of the index.php file with the appropriate code to display that favicon file. It prefers the favicon file in the template folder, so the template-icon will always take precedence over the root icon.

The solution turned out to be easy: Delete the favicon from the template folder. Then the check for that icon failed and the root icon was be inserted by the html.php file. My <link> tag could then be removed as redundant. Piece of cake once I figured out what was going on.

It'd be nice if they documented it in the "getting started" docs.