Joomla! Community Magazine™

Fiona Coulter

Towards the end of March, I had to share with the community that one of my collegues, sounding board and friends from JSphere had passed away after a long illness bravely fought (T4C) Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.

I met Fiona who ran Spiral Scripts while working on the Vulnerable Extensions along with Bernard Toplak and the security forum. The extension that runs the VEL was written by her. Many people who worked with her expressed their sorrow and I have passed their condolences on to the family.

Over a decade ago, a developer volunteering in the Joomla! Security Forum launched a suite of tools (Joomla Tools Suite) to help Joomlers diagnose issues with hosting, the installation and other matters associated with Joomla! Part of this suite was what is now known as the Forum Post Assistant or FPA.

 Abandonware is a term used for a piece of software that is no longer developed or supported by the original author.  In the Joomla-world, abandonware can include third party extensions such as components, modules, plugins, templates and/or libraries.

This article is about building a new vulnerable extension list (VEL) website to support future development with the JED and Joomla core, how it was done, and why.

Since 2010 the VEL team has organised the Vulnerable Extensions List on behalf of the Joomla community hosted on the docs.joomla.org pages. The VEL team felt that now was the time to move the VEL project onto its own website.