Joomla!® Tips - RSS feed

Multi-currency store: wrong currency on PayPal checkout

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:01:57 +0000

VirtueMart is great when you want to set up a store which works with multiple currencies. You can set up your own prices for each currencies in your shop, or you can use one of available currency converters. The core functionality supports the use of European Central Bank's live currency rates, but there are plugins supporting other rates too.

But you can run into trouble where you'd expect to not have any surprises: on PayPal checkout page.

A hidden gem - the Modal script shipped with Joomla

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:22:06 +0000

Sometimes you are looking hard elsewhere to find an useful, much needed extensions, just to find out, that the tool is allready in your toolbox. This is the case with the modal script shipped with Joomla, wich is a great tool (even with the konwn limitations) to add a basic lightbox function to your site without needing anything else, but a few lines of code.
Here are few examples of what you can do with!

How to remove the Joomla generator tag - reloaded

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:01:38 +0000

Why you should do that? Humm, there are arguments why yo should get rid off or keep it, but it's a matter of personal choice, mainly. The methods to removing the meta name generator tag for Joomla varies between versions. I discussed couple of ways to do it in an earlier tip. Here is a new one, working in Joomla 2.5!

Customize your page using CSS tricks based on active menu alias

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:48:00 +0000

There are lots of ways to make your page unique in Joomla, and there are interesting ideas on how to make your template even more powerful.

One of tricks not very often used and widespread is relying in one of the tricks I published regarding to available PHP tricks you can use to enhance your template.

You are not authorised to view this resource

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 05:19:43 +0000

Sometimes when you publish a new menu item, and everything seems to be OK, when you try to access the new menu item you just created you hit the wall: instead of the intended content you'll see the following error:

You are not authorized to view this resource.
You need to login.

Even more confusing can be the situation when a link which used to work behaves this way. The target content item is published, access rights are set to Public, and you still got this message! What can be wrong here?

To SEF ot not to SEF - is this a question?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:50:48 +0000

I'm joking, of course, but this is a real issue - from SEO perspective is a "to be, or not to be" type of question. To have some humanly readable URL's is key for your SEO success these days. And if Google and/or Bing does not loves you.... you are on the "not to be" side.

This File type is not supported

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:19:01 +0000

Have you ever seen this error message? Yea, correct it's seen in Media Manager when you try to upload files of certain types, as a MP3 file to use with your brand new MP# player module, or an Excel sheet to share whit your visitors.

Embarrassing. Let's get rid if it!

Other usual hacker tactics

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:27:39 +0000

There are numerous other tactics that can be used to break into a computer system, and these usually involve discovering weaknesses or loopholes in the server software's defenses. When a programmer writes software that runs on a web server, he tries to make sure that the software cannot be abused - but it can be very difficult to foresee every eventuality; vandals and hackers are always pushing software to the limit and trying out operations which the software was not designed to handle, in an attempt to discover a way in.

HTTP Sniffing

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:17:38 +0000

HTTP stands for 'HyperText Transfer Protocol', and it is the mechanism used to transfer data from one computer to another across the Internet. You can use HTTP to request information from a server, or to send information to a client by wrapping the request or data in a 'packet'.

Directory Traversal

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:04:53 +0000

A website is stored within a file system on a server. Some of the server's file system is therefore exposed to the outside world and can be accessed by an end-user's web browser. The part of the file system (or directory structure) that is visible to the outside world is limited to a specific root folder and its contents.

Denial of Service Attacks (DOS, DDOS)

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:02:12 +0000

A denial of service attack takes place when a hacker overloads a system with large or repeated requests for a service.

RFI/LFI

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:32:20 +0000

Remote File Inclusion (RFI) is a type of vulnerability most often found on websites. It allows an attacker to include a remote file, usually through a script on the web server. His pair, Local File Inclusion or LFI is basically the same technique, used on sites which have been successfully penetrated, and the hacker "planted" his files already on the server.

Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:03:50 +0000

Cross Site Scripting is a hacking technique whereby malicious scripting code (usually javascript) is injected into user input forms (in a similar way to SQL injection attacks) or incorporated in a URL query string.

SQL Injection

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:54:51 +0000

One popular and potentially devastating method of attack against Joomla powered sites is SQL injection. Any web application that makes use of a database usually communicates with the database for necessary functions using a special language known as 'Structured Query Language', or SQL. Joomla, by the way, uses an open source implementation of this language, MySQL.

Vandalism and Hacking

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:46:55 +0000

Vandals often use hacking techniques to deface a website or destroy data and files, but there are also those who just want to steal resources (make use of other peoples' servers without their knowledge or permission) or to cover their tracks by stealthily making use of hardware owned by legitimate businesses to carry out processing for illegal operations or to relay spam and viruses to others.

Why my Joomla site is this slow?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:28:21 +0000

Joomla generally is running at an acceptable speed - users aren't seeing differences between an average Joomla site and another CMS'es. But what if they do? What can cause the (sometime unbearable) slowness of some Joomla sites?

Module Chrome - an evolving concept

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 11:48:48 +0000

Styling the output of the Joomla was - and is - one of greatest challenges. One of tools making this easier for template developers is the "module chrome" concept/toolset introduced with Joomla 1.0 and constantly evolving ever since.

Block unvanted visitors using their IP address on your Joomla site?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:43:41 +0000

Sometimes you need to block a certain IP address, a group of addresses or certain hosts from accessing your Joomla website. Reasons may include:

It's a hacking attempt coming from that IP
Someone is scraping content from your website
A brute-force attack (in most cases a DoS - Denial of Service - attack is originated from that IP (there are too many requests coming from a particular IP
Someone continuously spamming your website
Some content from your site (images, media files) are hotlinked from your website.

The solution is simple, but is advised to apply first other tools to stop these bad guys - overuse of this tip can slow down your site considerably, use it ony if you don't have anything else - or you are in hurry to stop an ongoing attack.

How deep linking can give you an edge in the competition for better ranking

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:36:18 +0000

You knows the basics, right? Great content and a good number of incoming links are necessary for gaining the top SERP (Search Engine Ranking Points) for a particular keyword phrase. The good old way to reach this goal was to build an attractive landing page and add to it as many links as possible.

How to remove Joomla copyright info

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Joomla is a great piece of software, and the developers are deserved allready full support for keeping it evolving. One of the easy methods are to keep those Powered by Joomla texts and messages in place, and visible. But what if - with good reasons - you want to get rid of those? For example to make less obvious for Joomla-hackers to identify your site as a possible next target - to name only one of possible multiple reasons. (Read also this article about how to remove the Generated by Joomla! tag!) Or you may want to keep it, but a bit tweaked, to reflect better your contribution to that site of yours. The same questions are arising: where that footers are coming from?

How To Create A RSS Feed For Joomla 1.7+

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:07:33 +0000

After I upgraded this site to Joomla 1.7 I wondering, how I can create a RSS feed with all entries to re-create the original functionality we had in the initial site. The problem is that Joomla 1.7 use for this purpose the "Syndication Feeds" module, which picks up the Featured Articles menu item (if any) to create a RSS feed from the currently displayed page.... This works fine - relatively - if you use the default Joomla setup, the Featured Articles menu item being your default homepage. But this isn't my case - and this isn't anymore the case of most of the sites... so I needed to find out something else.

After finding out that don't really have any alternatives - at least not freely available ones - I decided that I will need to cook up something with what we have already in place.

Accessing the administration panel

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 11:57:53 +0000

Okay, you've installed your Joomla site, and want to began to master it. You click on the administrator link in the frontend and instantly hit the wall: a blank page is showing up. What's the deal? The cause is generally simple: This is happening almost always because your 'live-site' setting in your configuration.php file doesn't correspond with your Administration URL. You either have a www in your live-site setting in your configuration.php file and you are accessing your administration backend without the www or vice versa. It's highly recommended to correct this, the problem can impact even your site's Google rating.

TinyMCE editor background color fix

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:57:33 +0000

In an earlier tip (Help! My editor background is colored!) showed the most foolproof way to fix the common problem, when the template CSS settings are causing the WYSIWYG editors to have colored background, making edits hard to perform. Apparently there are couple of situations when the tip does not help - and there are many of you using still the default TinyMCE editor (and not switched already to the best Joomla content editor - JCE).

Welcome to Joomla-Tips!

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 10:00:00 +0000

Joomla Tips Joins Protests Against SOPA

The Joomla-Tips family of sites is a collection of the best Joomla!® Tips around, provided to you by webGóbé, the Internet's craftsman, and supported by LeftBrain.net in accordance of the purest principles staying at the roots of the Joomla!®: the Open Source movement.

As company dedicated to Open Source generally and to Joomla!® especially we decided to support the Joomla!® community by sharing the cumulative knowledge. All tips are free to access and use, and are compiled from our own experience, from different public sources (marked as appropriate) and Your contributions.

Feel free to rate them, place your comments or send in your own tips. The webGóbé's, the LeftBrainers, and the Joomla!® users community will thank you for your effort! Reading, using, but not sharing them is prohibited.

iPad and iPhone - how to design a Joomla site for them

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:29:13 +0000

What you must be aware of, when designing a Joomla page that should work on iPad and iPhone too? It is enough to have a proper template and the proper tools to display the respective versions when your Joomla site is displayed on these devices?

Caching reloaded

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 08:33:57 +0000

This tip is only for Joomla 1.0! For newer versions the handling of bandwidth is more cleverly solved, so read on only if you still use Joomla 1.0.

PHP code snippets to conditionally add things to your template

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:18:48 +0000

The Joomla ItemID-related management of modules is a powerful tool, but sometimes you need to show/hide parts of your site on two special cases not covered by this tool: when you need to show/hide things regardless of the active ItemID - for example on all detail listings page of a given component, or when you need to deal with a component which have poor support of ItemIDs - as VirtueMart, which is notoriously misbehaving in this regard.

Insert a plugin (or a module) anywhere

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:59:56 +0000

You might need to use a plugin's output in a component, or to insert a module in a page outputted by an arbitrary component. I mean ANY plugin which has it's own output in ANY Joomla component you like.

I know, there are couple of ready-made solutions, but all of these are specific to a given component(s) and some components have their own plugins to do that.

Enhance your security with .htaccess rules

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:18:14 +0000

One of often overlooked security (and not only) resource for any Joomla site is under your fingertips! With each Joomla install (even from the old Mambo days) you have a file named htaccess.txt in your site's root directory. In most cases is never touched, and left as is - most weekend webmasters don't even know what is for. A few are using it to help Joomla or the specialized SEF URL builders to make those pretty SEF URL's for their site. And that's pretty easy - in most cases it's enough to rename it to .htaccess, and you are set. But there is much more power hidden there...

Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated - reloaded

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:48:35 +0000

In another post about Function eregi() deprecated I provided some readily fixed Joomla 1.0 files to overcome issues related with upgrading to PHP 5.3 for Joomla 1.0 sites. But since a Joomla site is not built only from the core code, but there are other third party add-ons too, not only these older Joomla sites can be plagued by bad coding practices. The most problematic issues are related with templates. Most of the addons are fixed already, but you might have templates with unsupported functions. Here are couple of tricks wich might help you fix them!

XML Parsing Error at. Error

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:43:55 +0000

After moving a site to a new server I found this error in the backend - at least one error per page, but casually even more.

XML Parsing Error at. Error

No error number, no line number... What a heck!

How to turn your error reporting level to maximum?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:26:23 +0000

Anyone who maintained/developed something with or for Joomla, or needed to troubleshoot something on a misbehaving Joomla site knows the feeling: something does not working, and the available error messages aren't showing enough information to help you track down the root of the issue.

Any extra bit of info can help, so here is a tip for Joomla 1.7 which might help you got that.

What you should NOT do for a good SEO?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 17:15:14 +0000

Everybody tells you to do this and do that for SEO, and SEO companies can be very aggressive on their offerings - and misleading on free advices... But nobody really telling you what you should avoid when you want to increase your site's chances to be rank high on major search engines. And more important, nobody is telling you, that search-engine robots are getting smarter with every new release, they are harder to be fooled, and better mimicking/anticipating the real Internet user's behaviors/preferences. Having these in mind, let's enumerate a few bad ideas, known traps weekend webmasters often falling into:

Joomla Tips Joins Protests Against SOPA

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:34:09 +0000

The Joomla Tips site supports the Joomla! project wich joins the ranks of US and international Internet and technology organizations like Free Software Foundation (FSF), Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Mozilla, Google, Wikipedia, Open Source Initiative, WordPress, and Human Rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, in expressing our concern with these US Congress and Senate bills:

Information on H.R.3261 - Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show
Information on S.968 PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/show

A US Congressional vote is slated on these bills for this month [now delayed until February], and many feel that it will inevitably become a mandate for formalized Internet censorship, with an impact that goes far beyond the borders of any single country.

PIPA introduces a deeply concerning degree of legal uncertainty into the internet economy, particularly for users and businesses internationally. And while SOPA is also a US bill, it has several provisions that would have serious implications for international civil and human rights which raise concerns about how the United States is approaching global Internet governance.

The Joomla! project respects legitimate Intellectual Property rights of others, but we are concerned about the consequences of such far reaching laws, both for citizens of the US, and the global community.

Today, the 18th of January 2012, many organizations will show solidarity by participating in a massive website blackout, and other forms of protest. As an international Open Source software project, Joomla! champions an open internet for all, and expresses its concern over these US Congress and Senate bills.

Sources and links:

Save Failed with the Following Error: Invalid Parent ID

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:36:49 +0000

When I have seen first time this error on Joomla 1.6 while tried to save a new article in Article Manager I was lost:

Save Failed with the Following Error: Invalid Parent ID

Stopping Google from indexing e-mail links

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:14:57 +0000

Recently one of my clients - who are still believing in "Page Rank Sculpting" whatever this may mean - asked me to stop Google from indexing some of links Joomla generates. Most of them are easy to "patch", using various tools (sh404SEF, Marco's nofollow plugin), the most problematic one (for me, of course) was the E-mail this button on the top of the article.

Layout

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 12:19:29 +0000

Components, as you already know, are fairly complex and have the ability to display different information in different ways. For example, the Articles Component (com_content) is able to display a single article, or articles in a category, or categories in a section. Each of the ways of representing the different types of data (an article, or a category, or a section) is called a "view" (this comes from our MVC terminology).

Global Checkin

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:19:35 +0000

Sometimes, if more people work on the site, you can get locked out of a certain module or article because the site thinks someone else is still editing that item. When opened, each Joomla item is checked out, this way Joomla protects each editable item from being edited by two separate users at the same itme, and this way avoiding potential confusion and other obvious problems. When the editing user quits normally the process, the item gets checked in back. But sometimes, when the process isn't ending by the user normally (bu clicking one of save, save&close, save&new, close or similar buttons, depending on Joomla version and edited item) the items are remaining checked out. This happens also when user session gets closed without the above actions taking place (timeout, browser or connection forcefully closed, browser/OS frozen. etc.), That is very common and it is not a big deal. If you have enough user level - and if you are playing with the administrative backend, you probably have - you just have to go in the administrative side of your site and hover over the "Tools" menu item and select "Global Check In." Now Joomla! knows exactly what is being edited and if that article or section was locking you out before, but not really being modified, Joomla! will unlock it so you can get back to business.

How to reuse Joomla 1.0 Templates

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:16:20 +0000

Do you have a huge collection of nice Joomla 1.0 templates, and dunno what to do with them? Let's go green and reuse them!

Style your tooltips

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:10:38 +0000

A tooltips is a piece of text that pops up when you hover the mouse over a region on a website. If you use the Joomla! back end, for example, tooltips are used to help explain the action of different parameters. The tooltips can add functionality and fun to your site, but just inserting them without styling them accordingly can have an unusable or "just" boring result. And you want to avoid both, I guess...

This Site Is Temporarly Unavailable

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:47:35 +0000

You may already seen this annoying message instead of your Joomla site:

This site is temporarily unavailable.
Please notify the System Administrator.

And you are virtually clueless what to do about, and even the smallest bit of info on what happened can be a lifesaver.

Create your next Joomla site locally with Ampps

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:55:25 +0000

Like the majority of web developers I develop my websites and services locally before Ipublish them on the Internet. This makes sense in a variety of ways, from saving a lot of bandwidth to faster updating or improved security.

Even better, new technologies have made it a lot easier to setup a local web development system on any PC. Ampps, which stands for Apache MySQL PHP Python Softalicious, is a free web development environment for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems that can be installed with just a few clicks. Once up and running, it is up to the user to install web applications from the local admin interface. The program can install 260 web applications that include - obviously after Joomla, my first preference - highlights such as WordPress or Drupal, and lesser known applications such as the course management system Moodle, several types of Wikipedia-like applications or feed aggregators such as Gregarius.

How to sell your downloadable products?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:18:16 +0000

Yes, things like media files - or your software. No, I don't sell software - I give it away for free, for example here. Bu I build sites with selling capabilities. My favorite solution for it is VirtueMart, THE shop to be used with Joomla.

Is powerful - but is not for beginners, you can easily lost here without proper guidance.

JFolder::create: Could not create directory

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:22:01 +0000

The full error looks like this:

JFolder::create: Could not create directory
Warning! Failed to move file.

You might see this nagging error every once you install something to your Joomla site. Apparently everything working, but - as any errors you see - should alert you: something isn't right with your site, and even if apparently everything works, you might have unexpected problems later!

Move your /temp and /log folders outside of webroot

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:49:29 +0000

It's always a wise move to move your sensitive files outside of the so called WEBROOT, the directory which is used by Apache to show your website. This way you can be sure, that nobody else, but your Joomla core code can use these files.

Moving some files/folders, like the main configuration.php or the location of admin login may be tricky, but mowing these two key folders is relatively simple.

Move your config file outside of webroot

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:23:05 +0000

This is a core hack. Files you change as described on this page will be overwritten during updates of Joomla!

This tip explains how to move your configuration.php file outside of your webroot as well as making it unwritable by the server. That makes it nearly impossible for someone to corrupt or gain access to the information in the file.

Blank page when accessing Joom!Fish

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:52:09 +0000

It's weird and scary - in a perfectly functioning Joomla site I installed one of my favourite components, Joom!Fish - remember, I'm the multilang guy - and all I got was a blank screen. Obviously, something gone south... but what?

Can I just paste content from Word?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:30:00 +0000

The most likely complaint you can get after launching a Joomla site is, that the owner calls you or mails you, saying, that the page is looking weird after he added his first content item. Blindly you can bet, that he (sometimes despite your warnings) just copy/pasted that content from a Word document, another web-page or some other word processor. The order above isn't an arbitrary one, BTW! What you can do? Humm, you can clean his content item, but you must make them understand, why isn't a good idea to do this, and you must provide them with an alternative: an easy way to paste from Word without damaging (badly) the site.

Auto publish new content in frontpage

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:27:52 +0000

If you run a Joomla site where you want the new content items by default to be published on the frontpage, you're out of luck, this is something Joomla don't let you set in some config file. In the normal Joomla workflow the Publisher (or someone ranked higher) will decide/need to decide if and when put a given content item in the frontpage. You may need this (or you're bored already needing to go back again and again in editing mode just to click on that select box...).

Emptying the trash in Joomla 1.7

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:00:00 +0000

As you may experienced already, Joomla 1.7 has simplified much of the Joomla content work-flow, making things easier and faster to do. However, one of the things that has gotten slightly more complicated is finding and emptying the trash.

Joomla 1.5 ACL explained

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:02:18 +0000

Despite claims to the contrary Joomla 1.5 does have an ACL system. It may be rudimentary but when fully understood can be very useful.

How to configure Joomla to open by more than one domain?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:35:27 +0000

Did you followed the advices of SEO gurus, and now you have a bunch of domain names, like mydomain.com and mydomain.org, mydomain.info and mybestdomain.net, and you want to use all of them to display your sole, well built Joomla site, but dunno how? Here's the trick you need!

Keep your Joomla core up to date!

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:12:53 +0000

You may think that updating your Joomla site to the latest version is not something worth doing every time a new version is released. The site works just fine, and you are not interested in the eventual new additions. You're wrong! There's always a major reason for update to the latest version of Joomla: Security!

Moving the location of Admin login - reloaded

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:45:03 +0000

In a previous tip where I described how you can made a Joomla site more secure by relocating the admin login page I presumed that anyone reading it is a code guru. But what if not? More and more webmasters today are casual Joomla users - and they deserve attention too!

Moving the location of admin login

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:10:53 +0000

Most of attacks on the web - and Joomla sites aren't an exception - are made fully or in first phase at least by automated robots. These are using known entrance points as administrator logins to most used software solutions to try they chances to break in. So it's a wise move to change these well known locations. But wait! The need to upgrade compatibility may made this difficult, so, how we can do this without changing a line in Joomla code?

Change the default Joomla database prefix

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:46:50 +0000

Every hacker in this world knows, that by default all Joomla database tables have the "jos_" prefix. Is that well known, than even automated defacing scripts are using this, and there are a lot of "tools" which are capable to automatically probing your site having this presumption built into them.

How to override the output from the Joomla core

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 11:24:11 +0000

There may be occasions where you would like to change the way a Joomla! Extension (such as a Component or Module, whether from the Joomla! core or produced by a third party) is displayed on your site. Of course, you could recode the Extension from scratch, but that may be a bit ambitious for you! Thankfully, there is another way.

Component Output Types and Layout Overrides

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:32:00 +0000

A powerful tool to style your site is to use layout overrides to style any MVC compliant component's output in your template. May sound very scary, but shouldn't - a versed Joomla webmaster like you will handle the challenge easily.

User groups

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 10:11:27 +0000

By default, across all Joomla versions from Joomla 1.0, through Joomla 1.5, Joomla 1.6 to the Joomla 1.7 the basic structure of default user groups is unchanged. The users are generally sorted in 3 main categories, the unregistered/not logged in users, the registered users with frontend only access and the backend users. The exact naming of these main groups are varying across the different Joomla versions, but the default end level groups are the same. The groups and their core permissions are as follows:

Frontend

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:55:53 +0000

The Frontend is a collective term to name the areas of the website as visitors or registered users see it. A registered user normally works only in the frontend. It is like in a store, where the goods are displayed in shop windows and on shelves. Here you can have a look around.

So, in nutshell: it's everything an unregistered user (Guest) and all other registered users, withouth administrative user rights (the members of main Registered group and it's subgroups) can see.

Debugging a translation

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:22:28 +0000

You just finished a development of a new component/module/plugin, which has multilanguage support, or just finished a translation of such a Joomla addon and want to doublecheck the result, and don't know how to do it? Don't look further, Joomla supports some useful debugging mechanisms that can make it easier to locate untranslated strings and diagnose problems with language translations in installed extensions.

Making templates translateable

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:12:15 +0000

Joomla is a truly international application and supports the translation of all strings contained within it. Templates are no exception on this. They are a bit neglected, but a little extra time spent here will ensure that the strings used in your templates are translatable will pay back - and will give you an edge over your competitors.

Formatted fields in language translation strings

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:54:05 +0000

Sometimes it is necessary to include specially formatted fields within a string to be translated. This usually happens where numbers are involved but can occur for dates and times or when precise formatting instructions are required. If the strings were not to be translated the standard PHP functions printf and sprintf could be used. The printf function outputs a string formatted using embedded formatting instructions; the sprintf function returns a string formatted using the same embedded formatting instructions.

Pagination Links Overrides

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:10:41 +0000

Before the Joomla 1.5, pagination override was a nearly impossible task. The control the display of items-per-page and the pagination links used with lists of information has become much easier.

Module Layout Overrides

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:03:07 +0000

The best way to create individual look of your Joomla website, since Joomla 1.5 is to create module overrides. These are special files, placed in your template's directory, used to override the output of your existing modules.

Category Meta Data

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 11:07:14 +0000

One of most annoying limitation SEO wise in the Joomla versions prior to Joomla 1.6 was the inability to set directly (without use of some SEO component or a core hack) meta data information for categories. This was important especially on category blog or category list type of pages, where you have left without proper way to control the meta data added to these pages.

Content

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:12:18 +0000

Technically, content is every piece of text and media that is distributed/displayed via your site, whether that be in the component, module, mambot/plugin, or template. In Joomla, when someone says content, they are probably referring to the core content component and the content items that are entered into that component and displayed on your site.

Joomla ACL

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:46:57 +0000

ACL stands for access control levels. It refers to who has permission to do what on the website, including read, create, edit, delete, or log in, among other permissions.

Many think of ACL as relating to the front end of a website only. For example, when I log into the website, what articles do I have available to me? And if someone else logs into the site, do they see the same articles, or do they see different ones?

Help! I'm Locked Out Of My Site!

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:29:33 +0000

Beginning with Joomla 1.6 it's possible to lock anyone out of the back end of the website — including Super Users with Admin permissions — by setting the Site Admin permission to Deny. And this is something you can do accidentally against yourself by playing with the permissions without knowing how exactly these settings are working. That can have unpleasant side effects especially at the Super User group or at the Manager or Administrator group level. If Manager or Administrator is set to Deny, the Super User would inherit Deny from these groups, even if the Super User group is set to Allow.

Lost admin password - reloaded

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:29:28 +0000

Did you manage to lost your password? Worst, maybe you lost the Super Administrator password? And for some reason you can't use the retrieve lost password functionality of Joomla... If you use Joomla, if you forget your password you could just simply click on the "Forgot password" menu, and the new password will be sent to your email address. But what if you can't remember the exact e-mail address, or you have a local, development version and did not have the mailer handy... or your Internet connection is down? Or, worse - happened to me couple of times - you need to overtake a site originally developed by someone else?

Finding module positions on a Joomla 1.7 page

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 08:41:07 +0000

In the Joomla 1.5 world things where relatively simple: you just added "&tp=1" to the live site homepage's URL, and the available module positions where shown, with a red border and the module position's name in the top left - unless the template's author didn't applied some tricks from preventing you doing that. But what about Joomla 1.7? Anyone tried to do the trick even on a default install can see, that the trick apparently does not works here. Why?

Just turned SEF on and inner page images where gone

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:38:42 +0000

Did you had this experience? Couple of days ago I just turned on SEF and the inner pages began to act weird - images disappeared, modules misbehaved, scripts weren't loaded...

My first reaction was that I have set something wrong... or the SEF component I used have a flaw. After few days of digging I found that the issue has a much simpler cause.

My MySQL database does not support UTF-8! Do I have a problem?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 11:57:53 +0000

If you search for the title of this tip you will found lot of hits. Actually, my last search returned 6.6 millions of hits! Apparently lot of people are having with - or has fears on this subject. When I first published this tip, back in 2005, there was no such amount of answers/references, and I think, that this real flood of sites about this potential issue is not because lot of people would having problems, but because more and more people are getting into building interactive sites.

So, do You have problems?

Give a boost to your site's search speed

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:37:36 +0000

When one needs something, usually want it fast' and with large, complex Joomla sites that may be a problem. Sometimes the search takes... okay, not forever, but long enough to think about how you can give it some extra speed. Here are some tips and tricks to accelerate Joomla search speed:

Submitting content from frontend

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:29:11 +0000

Indeed, what's needed for a user to submit a new content item from the frontend, and how he/she should proceed?

First of all the user must have the privileges corresponding to the authorization level of "author" or above.

Who is the real author?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:04:02 +0000

The Joomla has a nifty, often used feature, along other information can show the content item's/articles author name just below the title. It's useful especially when the site is maintained by a number of editors and/or contributors. But sometimes - especially when the site is just launched - all authors are the same. The explanation is simple, Joomla assigns by default as author of the article the user who created/entered it in Joomla's content manager. And this, at beginning, is generally the Administrator user, or the editor in charge to launch the site. What you can do?

Server Settings

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:29:31 +0000

Joomla specifies certain settings that are recommended for proper functioning of the system. A list of the recommended and actual settings is displayed when you install Joomla. One of the recommended settings is to have 'Display Errors' switched on. This is very useful when developing and debugging a site, but there is a security vulnerability in PHP (not Joomla, but the language in which Joomla was written) which may allow cross-site-scripting attacks when the display errors option is enabled, if you have a script which produces an error.

Secure your standalone scripts used in a Joomla site

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:17:47 +0000

Joomla has everything you may need. Right? If you take a look to the Joomla Extensions site, you may agree with this. But, as always, there may be cases, when the above statement is wrong. For specific need he simplest approach may be to use for specific purposes a standalone script. You can solve the problem - apparently - by using Joomla's wrapper feature, and use your scripts as they where part of your Joomla site. Almost perfect solution you may think... but your scripts are directly accessible by their physical URL, not only through the Joomla interface. What you can do about?

A lot. And surprisingly easily.

Show PDF files in your page

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:18:00 +0000

Did you ever needed to show a content of a PDF file in your Joomla page? No, I don't mean link it to be downloadable, but actually show it!

Until recently the only way to do it was DocMan, with a specialized plugin capable to show preview of the PDF files available for download. Was a solution... but to show one or two files was an overkill. Recently I had this problem again, and invested a serious amount of time to find this marvel:

Plugin

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:49:07 +0000

A plugin is a kind of Joomla! extension, in fact the smallest building block of a Joomla site. Plugins provide functions which are associated with trigger events. Joomla provides a set of core plugin events, but any extension can fire (custom) events.

Mambot

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:59:54 +0000

Mambots where the ancestors of current version Joomla plugins. Mambots were introduced in Mambo and offered possibilities to add plug-in logic to your site mainly for the purpose of manipulating content. As the smallest Joomla extensions, they where smaller or bigger chunks of code executed upon being triggered by specially formatted keywords/signal words inserted in the various places of a Joomla 1.0 site.

Joomla and Windows file permissions

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 06:30:34 +0000

As I said elsewhere on the site one of key issues of running Joomla on a Windows server is to understand and apply correctly the Windows files and folders permissioning system to your Joomla install. Instead of writing my own compilation of how-tos, I reproduce here the excellent tutorial written by Russell Winter on the Joomla tutorials site. All kudos are going to him!

For those of you that are either developing or delivering your Joomla! Web-Sites from the Windows environment, it is sometimes difficult to obtain relevant information regarding permissions. Unfortunately, it is a fact that most Web-Serving is offered under Unix and that Unix is pretty well documented within this environment. Hopefully the following information will go some way to clearing up any confusion and provide a little guidance.

Template

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:13:26 +0000

Many people think of a template as their website, but that is an incorrect way of seeing templates. Templates are used for providing a layout and design within which all of the pieces of your Joomla site come together.

Unresponsive WYSIWYG editor

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:27:49 +0000

The WYSIWYG editors are great additions to the Joomla, and we have lots of them around. They make a webmaster from casual user and can speed up the work of pros. But, sometimes, you find that you cannot enter text into the HTML editor, or click on the HTML editor's toolbar buttons - you are locked out of editing your content!

What can be more annoying as being unable to edit your own site?

jtablesession::Store Failed - DB function failed with error number 1062

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:14:11 +0000

It is an error which drive me crazy couple of times. It's easy to fix - but hard to detect why happening. I didn't see any good explanation which fits to each single situation I needed to handle it.

Before to tell you about the fix: stay cool, probably your site isn't hacked and the database it is in place... else you will get another, nastier error

So what's the direct cause? For whatever reason your 'jos_session' table is damaged. Since this table holds only volatile info about your user's sessions - and nothing recent, since they are seeing the same error, just like you - it is safe to apply one of following recipes:

Enhanced readmore links

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:13:58 +0000

The default Joomla "Read More..." link is fine... but as always is room for improvement. Especially SEO wise, but not only. How about to have a more descriptive and compelling "Read more..." link, complete with the article title for example? Ye-ye-ye, you can right now use sh404SEF for all Joomla flavors, but what if you don't have it?

Joomla Chrome and Template Overrides

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:17:00 +0000

When you developing a template for a new site you often get stacked, and hit your head against the wall: the code outputted by Joomla sometime severely limits your ability to format the output as you wish. This is true not only for Joomla 1.0.*, but partially for the Joomla 1.5.*. Yes, partially, because you can do things here - and you can do a lot. Searching for a solution for a problem I had run into developing a template for one of my clients I found this great tip of Jonathan on his blog on http://www.beckettwebdesign.com:

The ten commandements of SEO for beginners

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 09:54:06 +0000

Why don't have Joomla in the title of tis article? Simply because these are the basics, the cornerstone stuff any webmaster must learn and respect. If you want a successful site, you must follow these Ten Commandements.

Problems geting SEF URL's work on 1&1-s servers

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:13:33 +0000

Your Joomla site is hosted on 1&1? Great! ... Or not so great? Yea, I know the feeling, I had that experience too. All worked just fine (almost) until I decided to kick in the SEF engine, and use the .htaccess redirect, as I suggested elsewhere. And the disaster stroked...

Register Globals

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 09:54:06 +0000

Many of you probably had seen already the red warning in Joomla's admin interface, that you need to have the Register Globals set to "on", otherwise your site is exposed to security treats.

And also many of you haven't a clue how to do it...

So, let's see what an average webmaster can do about this problem.

Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in...

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 03:11:00 +0000

Do you have some old Joomla site (pre Joomla 1.5.6)? then is very likely you will got - or already have - a site running only halfway, full of errors saying

Deprecated: Function eregi() is deprecated in somecomponent...

Warning: Parameter 3 to showItem() expected to be a reference, value given in /home/someaccount/www/www/joomla/includes/Cache/Lite/Function.php on line 100

Yeah, you might allready guessed it, the PHP 4.* end of life-cycle is wreaking havoc in Joomla 1.0 sites and some early Joomla 1.5 implementations - or even newer sites, having badly coded third party extensions installed.

Joomla Site Statistics

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:17:31 +0000

Are you a good webmaster willing to see how your site are performing? Or you're a web developer in need to show to your client how their brand new/re-branded/tweaked/SEO/SEM mastered site is performing? If the answer is yes, you may already know, that web statistics is a powerful resource. And there are a lot of Joomla packages to help you. So, why you are reading this, instead of grabbing one and using it?

Yep, I know the answer, and you're probably here because you also know. If the site you want to "measure", slice and dice isn't a small, low traffic site - and I hope that isn't, - you will end up quickly with a large amount of data, which in turn will slow down inevitably your site, making (near) unmanageable, anyway very hard to backup, restore and do other mundane tasks like these. Here are my four hints on collecting statistics on your Joomla site without render it unusable:

Give a boost to your Joomla site

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:25:50 +0000

One of the problems any webmaster is facing that the site may be not fast enough to meet his expectations. How you can squeeze up that last drop of extra speed from your site? We published lots of tips on this theme, but let's reorganize and update them with possibilities of the latest Joomla implementation (1.5.10 as the original article was written, 1.7.3 on last update I wrote this). I try to present them in decreasing order of importance/effectiveness, but the actual order reflects mostly my personal experience - which may be different from yours - and not some rigorously measured facts. But, believe me, I have a good nose for this. Some of the tips are easy to implement - and some may need advanced knowledge. But I mixed them up there to let you know what you may need to check - or what you may need ask from your programmer/web developer.

How can I contribute?

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:11:29 +0000

Simply. Go to Member Area, Register, Log in and use the Submit News link if you want to add your own tip, or comment the existing ones! Anything considered worth to be shown will be published, wint mentioning the author. The Joomla community will thank you for your contribution.

Running Joomla on a Windows server

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 09:30:37 +0000

Yeah, you may say that nothing coming out from that Redmond-based factory does not qualify as LAMP environment, and Joomla is built yo be used on LAMP servers, am I right? Yes... and no. Why not let them to play with the best CMS around .

So, what a Windows aficionado should know if wants to run Joomla on his favorite server?

Turn caching on!

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 11 May 2010 00:42:31 +0000

To improve your Joomla website's performance, just turn on "caching" on the "Cache" tab from Joomla's Global Configuration. When caching is turned on, Joomla creates a static file or "cache" of your website data on the disk. When the static file is found, the system retrieves the data from the disk rather than from the database. This improves performance because it saves system resources by not making redundant SQL calls to the database. And it will also speed up the display time of the pages.

You can set cache refresh rate in seconds. If you don't constantly update your contents, you might want to set it longer. And to further improve it, go to all your modules configurationand select "yes" to cache option (not available in all modules).

Help! My editor background is coloured!

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 06:30:00 +0000

Yep, that's something you can experience with any of your new templates, especially the ones with colored/dark background. Why this happening? And more important, how you can fix it?

The answer to the first question is simple: the 'WYSIWYG' editors used in Joomla are just doing what the name implies: are taking the template's CSS file and rendering the newly entered content to be as close to what will be shown on the site as possible. And if your template's background is colored or an image file is used to fill your background, then that will be used there too. The fix is relatively easy in the case of most current editors. Almost all of them have the possibility to use a special CSS file in the editing pages. Here we will show you the recipe that works for the family of editors based on TinyMCE editor, delivered by default with Joomla (as JCE), but the solution is similar or can be easily adapted for all such advanced editors.

VirtueMart's SMTP problems

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 22:33:10 +0000

More and more users are switching to Google Mail, Hotmail and other free mail services these days. It's a great move... unless you have VirtueMart and your Joomla is set to send your mails through SMTP. You may easily end seeing something like:

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to smtp.gmail.com:25

The mails from other Joomla apps are sent, just the VirtueMart is behaving badly. Weird thing is, that you can see in the main Joomla config the mailer set up properly, and the port to be used is 465, as required for Google Mail, but as you can see the error message indicates that VirtueMart tries to use port 25! The problem is that VirtueMart has a code flaw, when sending mails through SMTP the port 25 is hardcoded, and isn't inherited from main Joomla configuration file.

The fix is relatively easy, but you must get your hands dirty with some PHP code.

Virtuemart Shopper Group discount problem

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:54:00 +0000

The VirtueMart forums are full of complaints like:

When a shopper from my wholesale group (50% off) opens the product page it shows the parent products discounted price as the price of each child. Any help would be appreciated.

So, here's the much awaited fix!

Google Indexing '?tmpl=component&type=raw' Webpages

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:28:00 +0000

{sh404sef_social_buttons}

When doing Search Engine Optimization tests you discover that your web pages are duplicated in the Google index. One record is correct and the other includes '?tmpl=component&type=raw' in the url. Usually panik strikes instantly... since the hype about Google's "duplicated content penalty" is still high, giving more, than 1,2 million hits, despite the fact that Google officially denied the existence of a dumb penalty for such a "duplicates", claiming that they are penalizing only copycat pages. so, it's mainly a false alarm... but since all SEO workers are living (and dying) form the confidence - or lack of confidence - of their clients, it's a problem, wich should be solved.

But let's see first, where these links are coming from, then we will find an easy cure for the problem itself.

Special quantity options for a VirtueMart Shopper Group

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:22:00 +0000

A seemingly simple question caused serious headaches in past weeks. One of my clients who has an already seriously cross-hacked VirtueMart shop (SkinRich) asked me to make it possible, that a specific shopper group she had, the Distributors, namely, to be able to order products only in six-packs, making warehouse people's life much easier, and costs lower. The other users should have the default quantity options.

After thinking a lot about how to solve the problem, I came out with a 4 line simple hack, which works perfectly for me.

Modules In Content

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:15:36 +0000

Modules are typically displayed on the left and right sides of the page... in module positions everywhere . It's not uncommon to also find modules on the top or bottom of a page. The display location for a module is controlled by the site administrator through the Joomla administrator panel, and it's limited by the template's internal structure. Generally you can insert modules only in the pre-defined module positions. The module management screen provides several options as possible locations for a published module. But Joomla does not provide an easy way if you want to display these modules in the main content area of the site.

Sitemap in robots.txt

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:49:20 +0000

Are you a SEO-conscioncious webmaster? Of course, you are!

And you already have a nice, standards-compliant XML sitemap! Congrats! (Maybe you used a Joomla component to generate it on the fly - Brilliant!) You even had submitted it to the Google! Great! And you think you can enjoy from now that well-deserved pina colada, right? Hold on, you have some important tasks to do!

How to remove 'Welcome to the Frontpage'

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:32:45 +0000

I did not realised until recently how hard may be even for some seasoned Joomla webmasters to get rid of that 'Welcome to the Frontpage' text from their Joomla site. But talking with couple of customers and being even hired for do this made me curious, and I Googled for 'Welcome to the Frontpage'...

The result may be surprise you... my last attempt ended on 25.000.000 (no kidding...) hits.

So, there is the free-for-all recipe:

Vulnerable extensions list

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:46:37 +0000

Even most of security-conscientious Joomla webmasters aren't knowing the existence of this list, maintained at Joomla docs site. There are listed all components with known security problems, and very important to know, the items once appeared on the list aren't removed when the problem is fixed, because large majority of Joomla webmasters aren't upgrading their site as new versions are coming out for the add-ons used. So worth checking, even if the components you use are listed on GREEN - aka fixed -, you may run in trouble, because hackers are knowing the list - and are pro-actively seeking Joomla sites using the insecure add-ons. So you will become easily a target even if you have the secure version...

Bookmark this link!

Vulnerable extensions list

Running your Joomla Website over Secure Connection

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:12:55 +0000

Joomla 1.5 and newer versions have full https support without any hacks being necessary. But what you can do if you want to run your Joomla 1.0 site over https for some reason? Upgrade it! ... Easy to say, I am managing even Mambo based sites, running rock solid and doing the job they have built for, so this might be out of question. Bud don't despair, You can do it! You must hack here and there... When I first run into this problem, the hack described below wasn't published yet and I learned it on a hard way how to do it on our own. But after I build my own hack, I found this one, which is more solid, as the one I developed. Be aware, that nobody guarantees to work on every server configuration or Joomla installation. Enjoy the hacks - but on your own risk, I don't guarantee nothing here!

How to remove the Joomla generator tag

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:26:52 +0000

You use Joomla? Huh... Me too... Did you know, that by this alone you became a potential target for some bad guys out there?

Like it or not, there are some nerds who are "specialized" themselves in hacking and cracking Joomla sites.

Scared? Not need too, just be cautious and take some countermeasures. What you can do about?

File and folder permissions

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:06:37 +0000

This is a key security issue, but unfortunately many of the Joomla site-owners need guidance on this.

First, let's see what you should know:

Joomla is a typical LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) application, even if runs on many other platforms too. The entire access rights "philosophy" is relying on the native environment's settings.

The 301 redirect

joomlatips@webgobe.com (Yoda Professor (webGóbé)) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:10:59 +0000

Just upgraded from a static site to Joomla? Or just reorganised your content? And, of course, you don't want to loose your existing Google PageRank and your external links...

What you can do?

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently". This is the solution Google recommends for webmasters to keep their ratings.

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