One of the changes in Joomla 1.5.8 is changes with some of the newsfeeds supplied as sample data which according to this bug report
It appears that all Joomla installations have been providing a loophole for advertising for Linuxcentral.com products in every installation"
This suprised me as very few of the Joomla sites I visit actualy use the newsfeed component to display feeds, so if the component isn't in use on a site how is this happening?
The answer is both supsiringly simple and at the same time potentialy worrying. If you know the url that a component will generate then even if there is no menu link you can still access it, as I already showed in my "Where is the search?" post.
For an example of the newsfeed component in action, even on a site where it's not in use try
http://www.domain.com/index.php?option=com_newsfeeds
But this won't work on this site!
Why?
HINT:It's not because I've uninstalled the component (which you can't do anyway as it's a core component)
Instead I've used a little used option in Joomla, that I'm not sure is documented, to disable the component completely.
From this page you just click on the tick to disable the component and now it will no longer be accessible even if you know the url.
There is an added benefit that the component will also disappear from the menu, which makes it less cluttered and confusingly full of unused components.
Just look at how clean the components menu is for this site. The only components there are the ones that I use.
TIP: For components that you only use occasionaly like joomlapack or eXtplorer you can hide them from your components menu until you need them using this method.
SECURITY TIP: If you no longer use a component uninstall or disable it now. Many sites, that are hacked by weak third party extensions, are hacked because the site owner was no longer tracking the status of the extension.
