As the maker of JoomlaPack – the Open Source utility to backup, restore and migrate your Joomla! site – I often have to face certain challenges. Like when a user told me that as soon as he transferred his site to a different domain, all links in his content would link to the “old” site. Fighting the temptation to dismiss it as a user error, I did some digging around. Throughout this journey I found out some of Joomla!’s link handling deficiencies, their repercussions and coded a workaround.

In this article I am going to talk about how Joomla! handles the link base and canonical URLs, as well as what happens when you migrate your site to a different domain, subdomain or even a subdirectory.

We live in a potentially hostile world. Spammers, scammers, hackers and - alas! - script kiddies are after our site, for all we know. It's bad if - like most people - your site is your personal page. It's humiliating if - like many - it's the internet presence of your company. It's devastating if you are one of those people whose site is their business. Having regular, automated full site backups is a good first step, but they're only good at fixing a disaster after it has happened. Putting restrictions and controls (such as firewalls and tough passwords) is essential, but only if they don't fail. As Einstein bluntly put it "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former". An ingenius hacker, or a stupid script kiddie, might stumble upon a way to bypass your security controls and gain unauthorized access to your site. They can even hack you yesterday and eploit their back door today.

So, what can we do? Sit around, act casual until disaster strikes? No, not at all. What we need is a proactive check of our site files. If anything unusual is added, removed or modified the equivalent of a red alert should go off in our head and force us to take measures to contain and fix the problem before it's too late. It all boils down to an easy way to get a difference between the current state of our site and the last (and also known good) state of our site. This is the question I tried to answer with JoomlaPack SiteDiff.

Today it was one of my most productive days. After a JCE plugin for K2 content items and putting modules inside tabs, I decided to do some PHP hacking, with great results. The object of my pursuit was to create a variation of the Factory pattern, written in PHP5, which can be serialized and unserialized at will. Purists will observe that my implementation is not a direct implementation of the Factory design pattern. In fact, it is modelled as a serializable version of the Joomla! 1.5 JFactory class, which provides static methods for instanciating Singletons. Let's dive to the code, OK?

Today I was reading Brian Teeman's blog post "Help my Joomla web site has been hacked!!". It outlines a pretty much scary story of site hacking. As we all know, security is a speed race. We have to upgrade our site software before a potential hacker gets wind of our outdated scripts, otherwise we run the risk of having our site compromised before we can react. What's more, the compromise might be exploited to the attacker's benefit long after we have upgraded the vulnerable site software, adding to our confusion. Quite a nightmare. But the hidden gem of this story, is a link back to Brian's "Are you a Dork?" post. He implies that attackers can easily guess the version of our site's extension, before breaking in our site. How can they? And what can we do to stop them? Read on for the full disclosure.

This article is currently available only in GreekΠριν από λίγο καιρό αγόρασα ένα πακέτο σύνδεσης Cosmote Internet On The Go, ώστε να έχω σύνδεση Internet παντού. Η μεγάλη πρόκληση ήταν να το κάνω να δουλέψει, παρά τις αντίθετες διαβεβαιώσεις του πωλητή στο κατάστημα Cosmote, με το Ubuntu Netbook Remix που έχω εγκαταστήσει εδώ και λίγο καιρό στο EeePC μου. Ενώ, θεωρητικά, ο Network Manager υποστηρίζει εγγενώς συνδέσεις 3G Internet, τα πράγματα χωλαίνουν λόγω του μη υποστηριζόμενου USB stick της Cosmote (ZTE MF636) και της εμμονής μου... να θέλω να έχω PIN στην SIM! Ο επιμένων, όμως, νικά!