Unable to Find a Page/Article in Joomla Admin

Question

I have two pages (articles) on my Joomla site that are publicly accessible but I'm unable to find them in the Joomla admin.

They were discovered by searching the website using the built-in search feature.

An example URL is: example.com/14-get-involved/page

I've attempted to search for the pages by the URL but nothing appears. The pages also have a couple of modules that I use only on the homepage. I look at the module and it's only assigned to the home page but it shows up on both of these pages.

How do I find these rogue pages so I can disable them?

I'm running Joomla v3.9.10.

Answer 1

First of all, you won't find the page in your menus: the ID in front of /14-get-involved/ indicates that there's no menu item for that page. Otherwise Joomla's SEF functionality would have changed it to /get-involved/

Do you have a category called get-involved? Does it contain any articles?

Are you using none-core extensions like a Page Builder component? If so, check the content that has been created with that extension.

If you still cannot find it:

To find almost anything in your website

• Use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) with a good search functionality (e.g. PHPStorm, Netbeans)
• Create a local web environment with a copy of your Joomla site (Akeeba Backup is a nice backup tool for that)
• Create a MySQL dump that you put in folder of your website
• Look in HTML of website to some unique code that you are looking to change, or in your case you might want to look for the string "get-involved"
• Use your IDE to search that search string in all your files (including the database dump)
• This will give you an indication where the string is used, and where to change things.

Answer 2

Since Joomla 3.9.x you can search the content of articles in the back-end of the website by prefixing your search term with "CONTENT:" in the search field.

If this does not help, you could temporarily disable search engine friendly urls in Global Configuration so that the links in the search results show you which component is generating the content.