Joomla 1.5: How to set Your Personal Favicon

Favicons are a great way to personalize one’s website, and getting a Joomla 1.5 website to display your custom favicon.ico file turns out to be a pretty simple affair. Note I did say Joomla 1.5, important because Joomla 1.0 actually has a different way of setting it up.

But back to the task at hand. Essentially Joomla sites house their active favicon in the currently applied template, meaning that if you were for instance using a template called colorfall, the favicon would need to be placed in the /templates/colorfall/ directory as favicon.ico (in other words /templates/colorfall/favicon.ico should link directly to your favicon file when called up in a browser).

What this does mean however is that each time you change templates on your site, you’ll need to move the faveicon.ico file around to the new template folder, which naturally can become pretty laborious if you change templates often.

Of course, at this stage after uploading the file to the correct folder and opening the website in your browser, you might be looking a little confused at the fact that the site seems to still be displaying the old, generic Joomla favicon, an annoying but understandable situation which I’m about to resolve for you.

Basically the problem sits with your browser’s caching policy. In order to speed up site loading it saves generic files for a particular site to the harddrive for faster access the next time you call up that same site. So now that you’ve changed the favicon, you need to delete the temporary files/browsing cache from your browser and then restart, which should now show up your site with its funky new favicon. Alternatively, if the above still doesn’t work, it could be that you currently have Joomla Caching available on your website. If this is the case, simply disable via the Global Configuration > System menu option.