A number of users have encountered and commented on a flaky “flooding” error on ViztaView.com over the last couple of weeks. They’ve also complained about issues registering for the community, long page waits, and other oddities. Today you might notice that all these troubles have disappeared. That’s because our Managing Editor (yours truly) discovered that we had installed a redundant component under Joomla!1.5, the content management system that runs this site.

In previous versions of Joomla, we needed an add-on component to rewrite URLs to be search engine friendly. Well, the Joomla! community responded with a system-level component that does that in the new version (v1.5, which you’re using right now — you’re soaking in it). Silly me, I had installed the old component thinking it was still necessary, and the two just did not play nicely together!

So. Remove it, and voilà! — flooding errors go away, and site performance overall improves.

Better yet, when used with mod_rewrite the new component really makes the URLs pretty and removes the “index.php” prefix altogether, making page addresses look like a real web site, not just cumbersome CMS-delivered addresses.

I love this software.

–Rebekkah

Update 25 September 2011: The above post refers to this web site in a previous iteration, when it was running with Joomla! under the covers. We have since converted it to live under WordPress, which we love equally, for different reasons. Enjoy! -Rebekkah