Sidestepping the issue

A few forum and email exchanges later, including some suggestions of things to verify or try, we still couldn't get to the bottom of the script error. For what he could tell, things looked fine on the backend; the menus just weren't working properly on the frontend. Too strange.

While I was still trying to figure out this problem on my own, I had tried making a new joomla site on a different hosting account that I have, so that I could test more freely. Copied over my Joomla template files, and installed the same components, including jReviews. But to my dismay, the drop-down menus worked fine on this other site.

The two sites happened to be using different web hosting companies, so I wondered if it was some version compatibility issue with some server package. When I suggested this to him, he replied that it might be easier for him to figure it out if I could give him admin access to the site that was having the error, or some test site on the same server.

So I made another demo/test installation*, this time only installing core Joomla followed by the latest version of jReviews (1.1.2). Then I copied over my custom Joomla template and re-created the menu structure from the non-working site. (*Nothing personal, of course... I'm just naturally paranoid and reluctant to give full admin access for a live commercial site to someone I've just exchanged a couple messages with.)

Surprisingly (to me, at least), the drop-downs worked just fine on this new site. So it must've been some conflict with something I installed previously, even though none of the other stuff used Ajax, as far as I know. In any case, now that I have a working installation, I can get back to work on customizing it.

Part of me isn't quite satisfied not knowing what caused the error on the other site, but the rewards of seeing this new site come together far outweigh the minor dissatisfaction. :)