Joomla! How-To's

If you’ve ever worked on an existing website, chances are you’ve run into a directory listing like the following:

Copy of index.html
about.html
contact.html
favicon.ico
index.html
index.html.bak
index.html.bak2
index.html.old
pricing.html

It’s also quite possible you are responsible for having created a mess like this. We’re always told to make backups of our files, and so we make them, often right next to the files of a live site. While it’s a good idea to make a backup of your code before changing something that already works, .bak, .old, and .other files can accumulate very quickly.

Made-up extensions like .bak tell us (let alone others) very little about the significance of each change. It would be nice if there were some way of keeping a history of every change made to a file. Better still, tracking who made each change would be useful. And a way of combining changes from two different copies of the same file would be fantastic.

Fortunately, such systems already exist.

I've heard a lot of talk lately about whether or not Joomla can handle large-scale websites, or if it's best used for small mom-and-pop sites. I can say emphatically that the answer to that question is that Joomla is not only useful for small mom-and-pop sites, but it can also be used to build it medium and large-scale sites. There are a few popular examples of large-scale websites built with Joomla, and two developers have been involved in a number of these sites: Mitch Pirtle from Space Monkey Labs and Fotis Evangelou from Komrade and JoomlaWorks. In this 2-part series, I am interviewing both Mitch and Fotis to get their insights on what it takes to deploy large-scale websites with Joomla. Part 1 is my interview with Mitch.

Good day,

Waaaaaay back in January, I took the time in this column to discuss with you the concept and need to patch your site. Since that article was written till now (May 16, 2010) there has been about 180 report vulnerabilities for Joomla extensions. And some number of them for the Joomla core (to be fair only a few).

Given that you might be using one of these, its important to revisit this highly important topic.

Have you ever browsed to a website only to find that half the content is unreadable? Or that certain characters are being displayed in strange and mysterious ways? Or perhaps you wanted to enter a foreign or unusual character but found that the result was a garbled mess.

The chances are you have been subject to poorly managed character encodings. Joomla! extensions are no exception to these occurrences, but with a little bit of effort and some help from the Joomla! framework, we can avoid these problems with relative ease.

Session storage is a very important aspect of web applications. In its simplest form, a PHP session allows data to be stored temporarily on the server and accessed throughout a user's time on the site. When that user leaves the site or is inactive for a certain amount of time, the data is destroyed. While anonymous sessions are common, sessions are usually associated with user logins. When a correct username/password combination is entered, a session is created around that user's access information and then read and checked every time that user loads a page. As a developer, you can access this session functionality to enhance your extensions.