The {modal} tags are not being converted

The Modals plugin is not published

Check if the Modals plugin is published. Go to Extensions >> Plugin manager and search for the system plugin System - Regular Labs - Modals. Then publish it.

There is markup on the {modal} tags

If you have copy/pasted code directly into your editor, you might also have copied along hidden HTML tags. So this will also cause the {modal} tags to break:

{<span>modal</span> ...}

Remove the extra styling or other html tags around and in the {modal} tags that might cause problems.

The modal redirects to a white page with an email address

This is caused by the Joomla core "Content - Email Cloaking" plugin.

I recommend you use Email Protector instead, or disable the core plugin.

The modal does not have the correct styling

Modals uses the sub-template modal by default (which you can change in the Modals plugin settings).

This means that Modals will tell Joomla to show the page using the modal template view.
Joomla will look in your templates folder for a modal.php file, and if there is none, it will use the modal.php file from the system template.

If you want to customize this sub-template, you can copy that modal.php file to your templates folder, or copy your templates component.php (if available) and name it to modal.php.
Then you can change it to how you want, like adding stylesheets.

The page in the modal window won't load

This could have a few reasons:

  • The url is not correct. Double check if the url loads the page when placed directly in your browser.
  • You are linking to an external site which doesn't allow you to open it inside your site. Some (usually larger) sites have a protection script which prevents it from being opened inside iframes in other sites. Sites like Google, Youtube, Facebook. See if they offer an 'embed' url for the page you are trying to link to.
  • You are trying to open a non-SSL url in an SSL site. If you are running your page in HTTPS mode (SSL), you cannot open any HTTP (non-SSL) pages with Modals. This is a protection on browser level.