Problem with List Of Categories (Categories View): 404 - Page not found

[johnjohn]

Hello,
I am using Phoca Download for years, great extension, thanks a lot.
Now I wanted to move to Joomla 4. As Migration did not work properly, I decided to install Joomla 4 new and move content manually. With Joomla 4 I have now a problem: I created a menu entry for Categories View. When I select a category on the web site, I get an error 404. So I tried List of Files (Category View). This one worked - and what was a surprise to me: when I selected the category in the Categories View, for which I had the Category View menu entry, I could see the files there as well.
In order to ensure, that my configurations and manual movement of content was not the root cause, I deinstalled Phoca Download and installed it again. Then I created just two categories and tried the List Of Categories (Categories View) - same result. After creating a menu entry for one category with List of Files (Category View), that category worked also in Categories View.
Any idea what went wrong?

Allthough the Phoca Download Plugin is not yet released for Joomla 4, I gave it a try. My idea: If Categories View is not working, I can create an article where I add Phoca links for the categories. Here the same effect: If there is a Category View entry in the menu, the Phoca link for that category works. If there is no menu entry, the Phoca link does not work.

Version informations:
Joomla: 4.1.2
Phoca Download: 4.0.1
PHP: 7.3.33
MySQL-Version: 10.3.34-MariaDB

Here the output from error page:
You may not be able to visit this page because of:

an out-of-date bookmark/favourite
a search engine that has an out-of-date listing for this site
a mistyped address
you have no access to this page
The requested resource was not found.
An error has occurred while processing your request.

Please try one of the following pages:

Home Page

If difficulties persist, please contact the website administrator and report the error below.

Page not found
/home/quickima/test.quickimagecomment.de/libraries/src/Router/Router.php:153
Call stack
# Function Location
1 () JROOT/libraries/src/Router/Router.php:153
2 Joomla\CMS\Router\Router->parse() JROOT/libraries/src/Application/CMSApplication.php:1069
3 Joomla\CMS\Application\CMSApplication->route() JROOT/libraries/src/Application/SiteApplication.php:820
4 Joomla\CMS\Application\SiteApplication->route() JROOT/libraries/src/Application/SiteApplication.php:228
5 Joomla\CMS\Application\SiteApplication->doExecute() JROOT/libraries/src/Application/CMSApplication.php:278
6 Joomla\CMS\Application\CMSApplication->execute() JROOT/includes/app.php:63
7 require_once() JROOT/index.php:32

[johnjohn]

Problem has disappeared; unfortunately I do not know exactly why.
I had continued with configuration of Phocadownload and Joomla. During that I decided to use new categories for better overview. After assigning the new categories to existing files I tried the download. I noticed that the created links did not match to the aliases of the new categories and thought, it could be a problem of caching. So I disabled Joomla caching - and it worked. After clearing the cache it worked also with cache enabled.
With this result I took a backup of the state with the error and installed it on a local Xampp server, to check in more detail, which of all the configuration steps solved the problem. But on the Xampp server, the error was not reproducable. So it seems, that something was corrupt and creating new categories and disabling caching had the healing effect.

[Jan]

Ok

[johnjohn]

Update: As I had a similar problem with PhocaGallery, I have now identified the real root cause.
My site is multilangual. In order to set associations between the two menus for the two languages I had to assign a language for the menu entry for Categories View. With Joomla 3 and it's Phoca components it was no problem, but with Joomla 4 and the related versions of PhocaDownload and PhocaGallery it causes the 404. It works fine when I set language for the menu entries to All. Then also the associations are removed, but for the Phoca components switching the language works without associations.
Additionally there might have been something corrupt causing the created links not matching to the aliases of the new categories, but this could have been a result of my attempts of fixing the problem.

[Jan]

Hi, can you describe some example so I can test it. I discovered some problems in Joomla 4 router when using multilanguage, I added some hacks for Phoca Cart, so maybe I can do the same for Phoca Gallery and Phoca Download. Hard to say, unfortunately the new router has still some problems (as it was made for core not for extensions - in fact not tested for extensions)

Jan

[johnjohn]

Hi Jan, sure. Here the steps how I could reproduce it starting with a new Joomla 4.1.2 installation:
Installed a second language (I installed de-DE).
In administrator's Home Dashboard installed Multilingual Sample Data, then I had two new menus, "Main Menu (de-DE)" and "Main Menu (en-GB)".
Installed Phoca Download and Phoca Gallery.
In each of them added categories "DE" with language de-DE and "EN" with language en-GB.
In Main Menu (de-DE) added menu entries with Categories View for Phoca Download and Phoca Gallery with language de-DE.
In Main Menu (en-GB) added menu entries with Categories View for Phoca Download and Phoca Gallery with language en-GB.
Selecting the menu entries for Phoca Download and Phoca Gallers we see the category DE in German menu and EN in englisch menu.
When selecting the category we get 404.
When setting language to All for the Categories View menu entries the category view is shown (after these steps empty, as no items were added yet).
I hope this helps. If not, please feel free to contact me again.

[Jan]

Hi, thank you very much for the detailed information. I will take a look at it and maybe a hack which I added because of SEF and language problems in Phoca Cart can help in Phoca Gallery and Phoca Download too.

Thank you, Jan