Joomla! Community Magazine™

In the second part of this series I described how to unlock a base level of performance out of your Joomla site with a few, simple changes. Today we're diving deeper into static media: JavaScript, CSS and image files. These changes are more involved but can turn a junker of a slow site into a decently performing one. Arguably, not all of these changes make sense for all sites but the performance benefits you get are substantial.

In the first part of this series I described why tuning the performance of your site is something you should do for both philosophical and practical reasons, as well as where to start. That post was by necessity a bit generic. In the second part of this series we'll dive into some of the basic things you can do in Joomla to unlock a decent amount of performance.

Joomla 4 is a major improvement over Joomla 3. Right out of the box you get a very fast CMS with built–in support for structured data (what was formerly called “microdata”), even several caching options to cater for any use, from lightweight persona sites to massive, busy portals.

Joomla! 4 introduces a plethora of new and exciting features. While most of them are very visible, giving you new ways to build and use your sites more easily, there's an abundance of features designed to enhance the security of your site. Today we'll be talking about WebAuthn, a feature that has the unique distinction of belonging in both categories: it makes your site login more secure and easier at the same time.

On the weekend of July 26th and 27th nine developers from around the world gathered in Manchester, UK to clean up Joomla's bug tracker. The project's bug tracker had grown unkempt, with hundreds of issues that were stagnant for a long time. Some issues were there for over a year. Moreover, the JoomlaCode issue tracker wasn’t really fit for the amount of growth Joomla had experienced since 2005. It was necessary to put the number of issues under control and move to an improved bug tracker and that was the goal of the Joomla! Bug Sprint.

Joomla!’s temporary off-line mode is a very handy option to temporarily take your site down while performing maintenance —e.g. updating the Joomla! core or an extension— and is even suggested by the official documentation for the unfortunate time that your site has been compromised. However, is this really off-line, or are there any pitfalls you should be aware of?

I promise you, this article doesn't have to do anything with religion. It talks about site security. The beast I am referring to, is unwittingly opening a back door to your site to potential hackers. You may not know it, but you could be a sitting duck. It all lies in the dark world of ownership, users, groups and permissions. This is a long article, but I promise you that you will learn things you would have never imagined. Let us shed some light to the mystery of the 777 number, and kill the evil beast!

With the abundance of e-commerce solutions for Joomla! it is very easy building a great looking on-line store, showcasing your products and effectively convincing your potential customers to add them to the cart. Beautiful images, obvious calls for action, unique selling points and a smooth online shopping experience are easy to setup and help you “seal the deal” with the customer. However, this is only half the story. One of the most overlooked business decisions when building any kind of e-commerce site is the payment method. It’s what affects the very last step of the online shopping experience and the single most frequent reason to lose a sale.

If you were to provide a short list of the threats against your site, which one would be the number one threat? For me, it's script kiddies. Those pesky individuals who don't have a programming bone inside them, but still can cause a great deal of harm to our sites by using pre-packaged attacks against them. Their success rate is amazingly high, mostly due to our fault. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate some trivial techniques to add a degree of stealth on your site so that script kiddies can't launch their attacks and even if they do, they will most likely be fended off successfully. Just like a ninja, you'll learn how to have your site lurk in plain sight without being spotted by those pesky attackers.

On quite a few occasions fellow developers ask me which is the best way to get started with Joomla! Development. Among other things, I always propose that they should have a complete reference of the Joomla! Framework API. The only book which was up to this task was "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development", albeit a bit outdated since it was written when Joomla!1.5 was still in beta, some two and a half years ago. When Packt Publishing announced that they'd release the updated "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development (Update)" I was ecstatic! So, here you go, I reviewed the new edition of the book and I'm willing to share my experience with you.