Redirect Loop for category article that is linked on a menu item

Question

I am refactoring a website which has the main menu items that link directly to a specific article of corresponding categories.
Now for each of these menu items, there are children blog category menu items (hidden), for each of these categories.

Until last night, this setup was working fine.This morning, when I clicked on the main menu items, I am getting "Redirect Loop" on the browser. The same happens if I try to reach at the article that is linked with the single article menu items, from within the category blog.

No SEF extension is being used, nor there is something special in the htaccess that could produce this.

My guess is that Joomla is getting confused and is going back and forward between the possible urls for that article. Note that I am also getting a redirect loop with Joomla's core SEF and rewrite disabled for these articles.

So trying to access the article with its non-sef url like:

index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11catid=8&lang=en

I am getting a redirect loop for it, which ends up with a url:

index.php?option=com_content&id=18&lang=en&view=article

this is actually the url that I am redirected and that stacks on the browser for all articles in question.

What's going on here?

Answer 1

Just sorted this out.

Two things happened here:

1. First there was a 500 error produced by Joomla, because of a MySQL query - from a module.

2. This website had a setting (inherited from previous development) to redirect to a custom Error article page. However this page isn't available anymore, resulting to a new 404 error, which again was trying to redirect to itself.

So a Module's syntax error in the MySQL query, ended up manifesting itself with a Redirect Loop.

Approaches that helped me troubleshoot this one:

1. The fact that any of the Menu Items I was trying to reach at, were redirecting and ended up with a redirect loop to the same url:

   index.php?option=com_content&id=18&lang=en&view=article

   I checked in the backup of the old site implementation and found the article ID - it was an article for custom 404 error page.

2. The most common debugging technique: Start disabling 3rd party extensions.

3. Setting up a clean Joomla Installation and try to recreate the same conditions - configuration.

Lastly, I haven't yet found out why Joomla is still trying to redirect to that old article for the error page... but I guess something hidden would be somewhere, which will reveal itself at some point.

I also wrote to the module developer about the certain issue of his module, which under certain conditions generates wrong sql query.