Last week I was doing some "optimising" on the site and one of the things I "optimised" broke. I guess this happens a lot when you are playing with software and going through trial and error to create the best working scenario, but this "optimisation" broke our Joomla registration process and so it had some reasonable ramifications for (thankfully) a short period time.
The fix was easy ... but finding it was hard. The fix was really just down to the inbuilt Joomla cache plugin that somehow was breaking the user session somewhere between the Community Builder and AEC (our subscription component) handshake. The fix was to go to the plugin manager and disable the cache plugin. That was easy.
One of the things that got in the way of rolling back any changes and therefore resolving the issue was that we had made lots of tiny edits to our htaccess file, started working with the CssJs Compressor plugin properly and also tweaked some of the Community Builder settings. In the panic, Id forgotten about the cache plugin and in hindsight should have noted the changes I'd made in the event that I need to roll them back. Not sure I'll do this next time I start tweaking - but its a good idea nonetheless.
Interestingly I couldn't see any fixes or mentions of the cache plugin for the few forum posts that I encountered with this issue so I'm hoping that this may help some of you. The forum posts I did encounter, pointed to deeper issues with sef url rewriting but this was what fixed my situation.
The specific error message is:
"Session expired or cookies are not enabled in your browser. Please press "reload page" in your browser, and enable cookies in your browser. Please refresh/reload page before filling-in."
And my fix was to simply disable the Joomla cach e plugin by going to:
1. Go to Extensions > Plugin Manager
2. Filter plugins to only show the system plugins using the drop down box int he top right hand corner.
3. Unpublish System - Cache.
Smarter minds than mine might be able to get this to work but for the moment Im happy with using the CSSJS Compressor for file caching.