Brian Teeman

I love the ability in Joomla 1.5 to override the developers idea of how to present the data without touching their code. This means I can modify the output to my hearts content safe in the knowledge that if a new version is released my changes won't be lost.

Well that's almost true.

Dork : An inept or foolish person

What does this have to do with Joomla? Well a dork is also the name given to the method hackers use to identify if a site is running a vulnerable extension.

As soon as a vulnerability in an extension is revealed in either the hacker forums or on responsible security sites such as milw0rm or The Open Source Vulnerability Database the hackers of the world use google to search the net for sites using that extension.

What do you use for backups of your Joomla web site? Until Joomla 1.6 (thanks Sam for adding this) there has been no backup routine built in to Joomla and yet backing up your website is the most important thing you should do.

No matter what your web host offers as a backup service this is your responsibility and only yours. Backups are too important to rely on anyone but yourself.

Since the beginning of Mambo "I want/need/demand ACL" (access control lists) must be one of the most common threads in the forums. But what do I/you mean by ACL and why is it just so dam hard to implement. (I assume it must be hard or it would have been done by now in the core)

There has been a lot of discussion and debate regarding the GPL and Joomla's use of it, or should I say "amended" implementation of it.

After a lot of thought I tried to condense my views into one relatively short article, which I am reproducing here for posterity. It was obviously written some time ago.