It is easy to sit back, moan and bitch. It is not easy to stand up and speak up. But if you don't then you have no right to complain.
In my travels to several Joomla! days this year, on skype and on email, I have been approached by a significant number of people who are all committed to the success of our Joomla! project.
Each one of them has had some gripe. Whether it be about the direction or speed of development, the changed role of OpenSourceMatters, trademarks in domains and logos, donations, software libraries but the actual issue doesn't really matter.
An essay on the roles and responsibilites of users and community members in an open source project.
Participation in the development of an Open Source Project is in almost all cases voluntary and traditional management cannot apply. Open Source developers are not therefore typically driven by financial motivation. Instead, consciously or not, peer esteem and a desire to acquire new skills are the driving factor.
Last night I was excited, honoured and suprised to win the ComputerWeekly.com Open Source Blog of the Year Award. But this isn't really an award for me it's an award for you.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who voted for the blog, everyone who has given me inspiration for an article, Marc Ozin from ReformJudaism for nominating me in the first place and two very special people.
The original idea for the blog came from Fotis Evangelou who pestered me to start writing until it was easier for me to start than it was to shut him up and Chris Marinou who is the brains and talent behind the template design. Without the two of them this blog this blog would never have happened.
I've blogged before about the the forgotten interface and joomla usability improvements and recommended two extensions to improve the joomla admin experience, CQI for the control panel and Advanced Administrator Menu to reorganise the menus.
Today I'd like to introduce two other "improvements" to the Joomla Administrator interface.
Together they will help you improve accessibility, usability, performance and generally make your life easier.
One of the strengths of Joomla is it's template system but this is also one of it's weaknesess. More and more the tendency for designers is to showcase as many different cool things as possible that they can achieve in a Joomla template rather than concentrate on presenting the site owner's content.
Sadly in the last 6 months there have been two published circumstances where an extension provider has been hacked and malicious code inserted into the extensions that they offer.
This meant that as soon as you installed the extension your site was vulnerable to defacement etc.
If there have been two published cases perhaps there have been more that we don't know about.
So is there anything we can do to prevent this?
Today after a very long time of waiting I've finally reached the age where I have the answer and I'm happy to say that Douglas Adams was correct it really is 42.
So for those of you that are still waiting I'd like to tell you that it really is true and life really is that simple.
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:
- "Are the sites running the latest version of Joomla?"
- "Are the file and directory permissions set sensibly?"
- "Do you monitor the extensions and make sure they are all up to date?"
And the answer was yes to all of the above.
