Joomla! How-To's

"Congressional Web Site Defacements Follow the State of the Union"
- Praetorian Prefect

An interesting problem that we as the US have is our denial of Cyberwar. While this post isn't exactly about that, it's close. Last Wednesday night during or after the President's State of the Union Address, several congressional websites were hacked by Red Eye Crew. Why is this of interest? According to Praetorian Prefect, they were all running Joomla!

Because of it ubiquitous nature, automatic emailing is something that many clients expect. People want to be notified immediately of changes on their sites -- when a new article has been submitted, or a blog comment has been posted. Joomla! already provides some of this functionality out of the box by notifying administrators when a user has registered on their site. You, however, may find yourself needing to implement emailing in your own components. As you may have already guessed, Joomla! provides a very helpful class for this: JMail.

If you've worked with any kind of database-driven web application, you know that HTML forms are the foundation of the user's interaction with the database. Applications use forms to take input from the user and store it or use it to manipulate existing data. Unfortunately, HTML forms can potentially be quite tedious to write. In this article, we will look at a handful of helpful functions that Joomla! provides to save you time preparing your forms.

Happy New Year - How's your patches?

It's about the middle of January of 2010 and in the news, Google was hacked by unknown's from China and Google is considering a few options, including a complete pull out of China. A large search engine in China (not Google) was defaced by the Iranian cyber thugs, Adobe was appartently targeted in the same attack as Google. And in other news the new BREECH report came out from the ITRC showing that overall while breeches were lower than the year before, the number of exposed records was higher. And as I write this article, this just came across my desk:

"Hackers have stolen the login credentials for more than 8,300 customers of New York's Suffolk County National Bank after breaching its security and accessing a server that hosted its online banking system. "
source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/12/bank_server_breached/

What does this have to do with your Joomla site? Everything. Today I am discussing patching and patch management with you. For the purpose of this article I am going to refer to my personal favorite work on patching from ProjectQuant - Measuring and Optimizing Patch Management: an Open Model. A must read in my opinion.

This post is for all of you Mac fans out there, specifically those using the excellent Coda editor by Panic. I could preach all day long about how using a quality code editor like Coda can both speed up your coding as well as make your coding better.

One brilliant little function of Coda is that it has a built-in code snippet collector called 'Clips'. What's even more brilliant is that Coda gives developers a way to share groups of these clips with each other. I was inspired by our friend Jon from Zuno Studios when he released a few clip groups relating to Joomla 1.5 development a few months ago. His clips are specifically geared towards developers creating extensions, and if you're at that level I highly recommend checking out his handy clips.

Since more of my day-to-day work involves creating templates, I put together a set of clips that I use almost daily for creating Joomla 1.5 templates. Lucky for you Coda users out there, I've packaged them up in a tidy group that you can download.