Brian Teeman

Two weeks ago at JoomlaDay South Africa I gave the first presentation of my new talk "The Hidden Secrets of Joomla 1.7".

A lot of work went in to preparing that presentation and I hope to be taking it around the world in the coming months. (If you can't wait to see it live or for the video you can see the slides now.)

Reducing the "Hidden Secrets" to a 45 minute presentation sadly meant that some of them were dropped so I intend to write about them here instead.

In my dim and distant past I was employed as a youth leader and as part of the training for that role we spent a lot of time discussing the differences between being a leader and a manager. The differences in personality required, tasks to achieve, goals and ambitions.

After a UX (User Experience) presentation yesterday I found this fantastic presentation by Kim Goodwin. 

Whenever I build a web site I try to do it so that the client will have as little to do or remember as possible and yet there are just some things "they just don't get".

One of the things that always frustrates me is when I re-visit the site after handing it over and it looks terrible. It seems that no matter how good the instructions are or how comprehensive the training is some users just don't listen or don't care.

The problem is that Joomla is just too dam good and will let the site owner do things they really shouldn't.

Over the last few years I've given a lot of presentations and I like to think that I am quite good at it. Or at least that's what people tell me. What they say behind my back I don't know.

Unfortunately I've also seen far too many bad presentations so I thought I would take this opportunity to present my purely personal tips and advice.

If you've ever received an email from me, chatted with me on skype or followed me on twitter you will know that the end of my arms I have two handy typo generators.

Today I finally found the time to upgrade my blog to the latest version of Joomla.

(No I won't tell you what version it was running but let's just say I really should have done it a very very long time ago. Funny how our own sites are often the last to get upgraded)

I've been sitting on several half written blog posts for the last week never quite managing to finish any of them. Call it procrastination or just the inability to get back into the work habit after the extended holiday season. You can even call it laziness.

It's even been suggested "He won an award and then quit ...".

The truth is I've been lazy, had too much fun clearing the pathway of snow only for it to snow again a few hours later, and messing about on twitter. (More about that later this week - I promise)

On Wednesday I explained how your Joomla site might be exploited

"Just because you keep your server secure and your software up to date you may have been exploited yesterday, ready to be hacked tomorrow."

Today I read an article explaining the exact same thing happening on a Wordpress site. I had tried to explain this to the site owner 6 weeks earlier but...

..or how do you keep your Joomla web site secure?

I've sat on this blog post for a few weeks as I wanted to separate any connection to the specific client for who this relates to.

So I'm sat in a hotel bedroom, idling away the time before bed, browsing a news sites when a skype window pops up on my Mac.

"Please help!!!! I've got 12 sites all on different servers and they keep getting defaced."

Now obviously I then ran through my usual set of questions:

1. "Are the sites running the latest version of Joomla?"
2. "Are the file and directory permissions set sensibly?"
3. "Do you monitor the extensions and make sure they are all up to date?"

And the answer was yes to all of the above.

Actually this article should really be titled "How NOT to make a Joomla template".

I've blogged in the past about using Joomla Template Clubs and software to create your own joomla template and I know many people like to design their own template from scratch.

But there is still a significant number of people who just take one of the three default Joomla templates and modify them to suit their needs.

If you are one of those people then this is especially at you.