Joomla! Community Magazine™

There are many webmasters who need assistance with their Joomla! site. Most problems webmasters have to deal with will be avoided by following these 7 simple guidelines for using a Joomla! site:

“I looked up that Joomla! CMS that you said you were using for my project. I saw that I can download it for free. How can you charge me $XXXX? Joomla! is free, right? I just want you to install Joomla! and make it look good for me.”

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.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

As he serves his country, Michael Babker finds time to serve the Joomla! project. In January 2010 he downloaded his first copy of 1.5, and hasn't looked back. He jumped into the forums and started tracking bugs. His contribution to 1.6 code is significant, and his fellow devs highly value his team work. On September 21st, the Joomla! community got a chance to show their appreciation...

Welcome to Joomla! in the Press/Media. You will find links and short descriptions of where you can read recent articles about Joomla! in the Press and Media.

This month we interview Stian Didriksen, lead developer of Ninjaboard, the latest Joomla! forum component from Ninjaforge. Ninjaboard is of particular interest here in the Designer's Studio as it has been constructed with design and Joomla! templates in mind.

When this issue is launched, I will be "hard at work" at the JoomlaDay West conference in San Jose, California. Since the JCM team is full of bright, hard working, and self starting volunteers, I had no reservations about being gone during the typically hectic days leading up to and following the launch of a new issue.

Well, maybe not 'no' reservations...

The Production Leadership Team manages all areas of Joomla! development, including documentation, design, coding, and development cycle. In addition, the Production Leadership Team manages all areas of the Joomla! project which relate to the production of the Joomla! CMS software and its documentation. For this issue’s article from the Production Leadership Team, we want to recognize mandville (forum username) and her significant volunteer contributions in multiple areas of the Joomla! project.

In pursuit of the optimal user experience, I usually want to control each aspect of a view. And as there is much more to a good site than a nice colour palette or a funky header image, my interference with an extension’s existing layout goes beyond the scope of CSS alterations. I like to meddle with my site’s views by customizing any output that is generated and that includes Joomla!’s error page.

One of many Joomla! Days around the globe in the coming weeks is Joomla! Day Denmark — a small Scandinavian country of 5.5 mil. citizens, but it has the most CMSs per capita. Since the mid '90s every web company developed their own inhouse CMS. But the state of the economy is in the favor of Joomla! and more and more webdevelopers and companies are realizing the benefits of deploying Joomla! because they can cut down on development time — and save money, get their websites up faster — and make money.

The Joomla! Setup is a series of interviews with developers in the Joomla! community, talking about the tools they use to get the job done, inspired by the setup. Can you tell who it is?

On the 1st of September five years ago Joomla! was unveiled to the world for the first time. It is time now for world wide celebrations in the Joomla! community, one of the most diverse communities in the Open Source world. With the least entry barriers, here anyone can take leadership and make change happen. It is a marvelous community of users, developers, designers, documentation creators, bug reporters and fixers, evangelists and every single person in-between who has touched and been touched by this software.

This article explains from my point of view, why being part of the Joomla! Community can be of benefit for you. This is mainly aimed towards users that only use Joomla! for their own site development, just for fun, or don't fall under the professional/commercial umbrella.

We live in a world where we have adopted standards in the physical and material world. The software world is no different. Joomla! has also become one of the most popular CMSs in the world and yet it has ways to go before its extensions abide by the standards. But we are hopeful, as a growing number of Joomla! developers have embraced Web standards and we urge the user populace to take notice of this key attribute.

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.

Ever feel like you're repeating the same tasks over and over while developing Joomla! extensions? It's a common feeling when developing for any framework but one thing that all frameworks have in common is that they make it incredibly easy to create blocks of reusable code.

In our last issue we were discussing about how any Joomla! site belongs to a homogeneous population, why this is bad from a security perspective, and how to avoid that by changing your database table prefix. In this issue, we are going to expand a bit more, by making sure that another set of common characteristics – the Super Administrator user name and ID – are different than those a potential hacker would expect.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

Many exciting Joomla! Days are coming in the near future all around the globe. While on-line communication and collaboration is great, nothing beats the opportunity of meeting in person. I am delighted to see so many Joomla! Days being announced from Nigeria to Denmark, Brazil to the US. So many chances to meet, share and learn.

Joomla! Day USA West 2010 in San J! California, October 1-3 and Joomla! Day DC October 16.