Support

Hi.

I wish to rename my domain name for my website on my same web server. I have tried it, and the public website works. However I am not able to access the new administrative login on the new domain, most likely due to the presence of the Admin Tools firewall.

I suppose I will need to disable or uninstall the Admin Tools extension. How do I uninstall it safely? I suppose after it is uninstalled, I can rename the domain name and reinstall the Admin Tools.

Thank you.

Regards,
Irwin

You did not tell me what happens when you try to access the admin login screen so I can't even guess what might be wrong. There are two parts to Admin Tools that you will need to disable:

1. The Web Application Firewall can be disabled with the instructions here. Look under the blue box at the section titled "Using FTP to regain access to your site's administrator".
2. The enhanced .htaccess file can be disabled by renaming the .htaccess file (that is a hidden file) in the root of your site, then renaming htaccess.txt to .htaccess. The htaccess.txt file is Joomla!'s standard file..

Thank you Dale.

I have some idea, but I am not sure if I am doing it right for this website. The previous attempt for another dummy website met with disastrous consequences because I did not uninstall all the Admin tools components and modules.

For this website that I need to rename the domain name. The steps, in my opinion, would be:

I have a secret administrator URL parameter. Does it mean that I need to remove this first and change it to unset?

Then select using Extension: Manage to search all the "Admin Tools" components/plugins/package and uninstall them.

Remove the .htaccess and .htpasswd from my administrator's directory. Do I need to do anything else here?

Rename my domain name to point to this IP address. With the new domain name, I want to access my administrator normally (without admin tools). Then install a new admin tools when I login to my administrator account.

Then pray hard it works.

You should not need to uninstall Admin Tools for this change. If you want to, you should uninstall the package, that will uninstall everything.

Let's think about where URLs are used in Joomla!.

1. In Joomla!'s Global Settings - in the cookie domain fields.
2. In configuration.php, in the $live_site variable. In almost all cases, $live_site should be an empty string ('').
3. At the very bottom of .htaccess Maker there are two fields containing URLs.

Regarding the .htaccess and .htpasswd files in /administrator; they do not "travel" well between versions of Apache web server. So if you move to a new server, you have to worry about them. You are staying on the same server so they won't be any problem.

The Secret URL Parameter should not be a problem either, it doesn't depend on the URL.

Praying is always a good step to add to the procedure. The answer to your prayers is usually good tech support. When I get stumped, Davide and Nicholas can almost always figure out the problem.

Thank you Dale.

I have managed to rename the domain name for the website.

I uninstalled just the Admin Tools package. After renaming my domain name on my server. I had some difficulty accessing the administrator's login.

What I did was to transfer the two hidden .htaccess and .htpasswd files into a newly created folder. Lo and behold, I managed to access the administrator's login. Then I installed the Admin Tools back into the website with the new domain name.

I suppose it would be good to have the uninstallation instructions on your contents page. It will save you a bit of trouble responding to common issues.

Thanks a lot for your help! Cheers.

I'm surprised that the .htaccess and .htpasswd files gave you a problem with what you were doing. I can't explain that. I'm glad you got it working!