Sometimes one needs to manage files on one’s Joomla installation but FTP isn’t up to the job because of hosting issues, e.g. many of us install Joomla with the apache (or other web server) as the owner and don’t want to open permissions for the FTP user as this often requires a 646, 664 or even 666 permissions. Remember that 666 really is the mark of the devil when it comes to file permissions – [...]

Upgrading / Migrating from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 This post presents a step by step tutorial showing how to migrate your Joomla 1.5 website to Joomla 2.5 using two methods, i.e. using SP Upgrade or JUpgrade. Instructions for JUpgrade follow afterwards. SP Upgrade is simpler as it ignores 3rd party extensions. JUpgrade tends to fail more and has limited error reporting, however if you do need to port items like Kunena or Community Builder [...]

Joomla 2.5 has had an update in the form of Joomla 2.5.1, addressing two medium priority security issues relating to information disclosure and 30 tracker issues. It’s a recommended security fix so update by:

Do I need to upgrade to Joomla 2.5?   So do you need to upgrade to Joomla 2.5? That’s the first question you’ll be asking yourself. For those of you who remember the migration from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5 I can feel you cringing already. It’s slightly easier this time around though but it’s still not a one click upgrade as the differences between 1.5 and the 1.6 stream, to which Joomla 2.5 belongs are [...]

Joomla 2.5 Released Well the title says it all. The good folks at Joomla.org have relesed their next Long Term Support (LTS) version of their ever popular CMS with added features, functionality, improved language support and enhanced security features. Click on the post for a rundown of the main points.

Posts in the Supplemental Index This evening I was having a quick look at Google and page rankings. I noticed that man of the pages were not being displayed in Google, yet were first page items in Bing and Yahoo. I haven’t built any links so that’s part of the problem but then I checked the Supplemental Index Tool over here and found that 39% of my web pages were in the supplemental index. Huh? [...]

This post will show how to embed a Google Calendar in Joomla powered websites. In the past I’ve used Joomla’s excellent event management calendars like JEvents, EventList and JCal Pro. These are great for replicating the functionality that one would be used to in MS Outlook, e.g. multiple events, with attachments, notes, attendees, recurrence and colour coded based on category and a plethora of modules. There was one problem however. While these offer alot of functionality [...]

What is Joomla? Well there’s a question I’ve been asked a few times and I’m ashamed to say I never even thought to post about it before as I had always assumed anyone visiting this blog would be would be looking for more in depth information about the CMS. So what is Joomla? Joomla is a “web content management system” – we’ll refer to that as a CMS from now on. A CMS gives you [...]

I’ve lost count of the amount of times I wanted to execute custom code in one of my modules. It’s not exactly hard but depending on template choice, what libraries are included and what I want to do I often have to jump through hoops trying out all the usual suspects or use something less than simple. Advanced Module Manager and Jumi will do this for me or I could code my own module (not [...]

OK, so I would like to increase security on a couple of my sites. You’ve probably seen my minimum security post from a few months ago (if not click here to see what I’d do to protect a joomla website as a minimum). So having browsed the forums and extensions directory I’ve come across the following helpful tools and tips JomLand Meta Generator – this tool will change that nasty Joomla generator metatag – it’s [...]