Engage not showing on the front end.

[pnjfksx]

Running Joomla 3.10.2, PHP 8 and MySQL 5.6 on Linux.

Installed component successfully. Enabled all requisite plug-ins. Set up permissions per doc. No database errors,

No content on the front end.

Set permissions to allow posting everywhere. Still no content.

Suggestions on troubleshooting?

[pnjfksx]

Also running jcomments. Looking to use Engage as a replacement.

[nikosdion]

Are you using Joomla articles? Akeeba Engage is only compatible with Joomla Articles, it won't work with third party content extensions (e.g. K2) or any other third party extensions.

Do you have the System - Page Cache plugin enabled? Try disabling it. If that works, you need to keep it disable for guest comments to work.

Are you using a caching proxy, CDN or other similar solution? These might be caching your front–end pages, in which case you may not see the comments or comment interface until they route the request through your site's server.

Are you using JCE? By default, JCE comes without a profile for Guest users and show a blank rectangle where the comment submission area should've been. You will need to create a JCE profile for Guest users or use Joomla's TinyMCE editor.

[pnjfksx]

It appears to be a template issue as I am able to install it on another site on the same server.

[nikosdion]

That is possible. Engage works by hooking the onAfterContent event to display content after the articles. If the results of that event are not displayed by the template then, yeah, you won't see anything.

[pnjfksx]

And if something like jcomments is using the onAfterContent event, how does Joomla handle that?

I found your notes on "No thoughts on" and have made the changes.

Waiting on the template vendor to respond.

[nikosdion]

Well, there are many ways to skin a cat.

One could use onContentPrepare to inject the comments interface's HTML into the article content itself. That was the only way in The Old Days (before Joomla 3.2 if I recall correctly; we're talking about a decade ago). It is a bad idea because the article text can be chained through other plugins' onContentPrepare handler which might end up screwing up the comments display or result in other hilarious artifacts — think about what would happen if something like ReReplacer started replacing content in the comments and the outrage you would get from angry users (“you changed my words!!!”).

Another way to do that is to use JavaScript to load the entire comments interface. Of course this means that a. if the visitor has turned JavaScript off they don't even see the comments and b. you cannot use Joomla's standard editor, meaning the developer has to reinvent the wheel.

Al other comment solutions I had tried were using one of these two methods with all the associated problems. The method I am using is cleaner, 100% following “The One True Joomla Way” of doing things BUT it also means that templates of a certain vintage or with template overrides snuffing the onAfterTitle / onBeforeContent / onAfterContent won't work. Frankly, I prefer doing things the right way even if it causes problems for a minority of sites which don't things the right way. I have found that it's overall a FAR SMALLER headache for me maintaining the software for years to come 😄

[pnjfksx]

I kept fooling with settings and such, then "boom" it started working. I don't know why. Such is the case when you are using trial and error. :)