Joomla! How-To's

Good Day to you and welcome to Tools you need to know about.

This article is part one of the TOOL Series. In this I want to introduce you to some of my favorite tools. In the first few articles, I will discuss them generally, then in future articles, I'll spend time discussing each one.

The tools discussed will be both GPL and NON-GPL tools as well as Joomla based tools.  Your comments are welcome and I hope that you find this series helpful.

Good day, if you are reading this, I hope you will take a few moments to really consider the need for a good incident management plan for your website. Ask yourself, What WOULD you do if you were hacked?

As a security guy, I get asked frequently about Joomla, and if it's secure. I start to answer, and am always interrupted with something along the lines of:

"..I know it's not, I just want to know how insecure it is.."

As if security is measured on a 1 to 10 scale..Security is not a scale, but a total philosophy, a set of tools and actions. Yes, it can be measured, but taking Joomla and singling it out is foolish. Looking at Joomla as part of your total site security makeup IS the right answer. You must measure security holistically. Any part of your security that is weak,weakens the entire infrastructure.

So how do you answer it? To begin with, Joomla is only as secure as the platform it is on, the extensions installed on it and the proper safeguards that are put in place. In fact, many times if a Joomla site is hacked, it could be any number of things. But here's the part that is hard for some to swallow...It's not typically Joomla's fault. it's many times the administrators fault for failing in some basic areas. Now to be fair to the admin, security is an entire practice itself, and in this article I will lay out some basic concepts both Joomla and non-joomla to help you understand how to secure your site.

This How To article piggy-backs off one of the recent articles, How To Change the Layout on the Frontpage. In that How To we discussed how changing a few parameters in the frontpage menu item could totally change the look and format of the frontpage. This How To will show you how Joomla! makes it just as easy to do the same thing on other pages as well.

This how-to is aimed more at Joomla! developers than our beginner or intermediate Joomla! user crowd. When creating an extension (module, component, plugin, or template), it's often necessary to give users the ability to choose custom settings by giving them Parameter options. Interacting with parameters will be for another How-To, but today I want to show you how to find the available attributes for a particular parameter element.