Since February 6, our shared hosting platform was under constant attack by malicious users intent on taking down our server.  In the past two days, we suffered many hours of downtime as our team battled this issue.

In the world of web development, two Content Management Systems (CMS) are very popular: WordPress and Joomla.  Both are so popular that they are common targets of hackers, and both have many known vulnerabilities.  It is crucial to keep your WordPress and Joomla site updated with the latest patches as they are released by Joomla and WordPress.  This prevents hackers from having easy access to your site.

Many clients host WordPress and Joomla sites on our shared hosting infrastructure, and the majority of these sites are not patched properly, leaving many vulnerabilities open for hackers to exploit.  This week, malicious users took advantage of those vulnerabilities and inserted a nasty script into many of these sites.  Once the scripts were uploaded, the attackers were able to run those scripts with the intention of disabling our server.  They were very successful with this strategy, and our team spent many hours battling this issue.

While we can do very little about the unpatched WordPress and Joomla sites (beyond warning about the dangers) we have taken a number of steps to combat this issue.  First, our team wrote a special program that seeks and destroys the script that the attackers were placing on the hacked sites.  Second, we edited our firewall rules to mitigate the affects of the script that the malicious users were using.

If your WordPress or Joomla site is still unpatched, your are still vunerable to a successful (and easy) attack of your website.  Please contact our team today to learn what we can do to protect you against these issues.

Unfortunately most Joomla templates have the footer information buried in some php code. But I’m going to show you the most common area you can find it. This is for relatively advanced users.

First step, make sure your template doesn’t let you edit the footer via a module position.
Second step, BACK UP YOUR SITE. Just incase you make a mistake at least you can fix it.
Third Step, Go into your FTP backend of your site

• Double click the “httpdocs folder”
• Double click the “templates folder”
• Double click the name of your “template folder” ***the one you installed
• Download and save the index.php page, or if there is a footer.php file download it
• Hardcode your footer into this area with proper HTML

Hope this helps.

In order to give your Joomla site a clean URL that makes it user friendly as well as Search Engine Optimized, you need to change the “htaccess.txt” file, and simply rename it to “.htaccess”.

What is the htaccess.txt file?
It is part of the Joomla core download. You can find it in the root folder of your Joomla site.

For those of you new to Joomla, one issue you may encounter when trying to enter in pure HTML code in articles or Custom HTML Modules, is that < p > tags may cause issues, especially with script functions.

To resolve this simply go into your Plugin Manager, then click on the (Editor – TinyMCE) plugin. Once in the plugin, then change the New Lines from P Elements to BR Elements. This will stop the editor from automatically adding < p > tags at the beginning and ending of all your work.

Furthermore you can also go to the Site Menu, and click Global Configuration. From there you change the Default WYSIWYG Editor to No Editor for those advanced users wishing to code only in HTML.

Have you ever searched Google for an answer to a question you didn’t know, or steps for something you couldn’t quite understand?

More often then not you will find yourself in someone’s forum, where people post all forms of data. Some a little more helpful then others. The point being, Joomla has a free Forum Component that you can customize to work with your Joomla website. And they have just release a compatible Joomla 1.6 version as well.

Visit Kunena.org to download and read more.

Technology allows a company to thrive and grow forward, but what happens when it lets us down?

Websites are reliable but again they aren’t impervious to unknown issues and errors that could potentially lose all your data. Therefore I recommend those users that use Joomla to install a Backup Plug-in such as Akeeba Backup Core

For more advanced users or non Joomla based websites a simple mirror of the httpdocs folder from your FTP server to a local directory works as well. Or if you prefer to have someone else take care of and monitor this so you can focus on the business end of things, we offer our NerdCare Hosting packages to suit your needs.

If your website went down today, and you lost everything, how would it impact your company’s productivity and financial commitments?

One of the nicest things about having a Joomla website is the infinite number of plug-ins that are developed and offered. Whether you want something simple like a Google Map showing the location of your business or a Image Scroller most often than not there is a plug-in available.. Sometimes you do have to invest time for the nicer looking free versions of some plug-ins, otherwise you can always purchase the ones you like.

Did you know that you can make your Joomla site more Search Engine Friendly? Simply click on:

Site >> Global Configuration >> SEO Settings

Below this section you see “Search Engine Friendly URLs” simply click “yes” as often if defaults to no.

What does this do, and what does it mean for you?
It changes the URL from;

www.test.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19&Itemid=27
to
www.test.com/overview.html

This makes the site much easier to navigate back too, especially if the user is manually inputting the site. As well it makes it easier for search engines to index a URL like this. Next time we will talk about Meta Tags in Joomla and how they help with search engines as well!

Joomla is a content management system (CMS) that gives the user full control of updating and modifying the content of their website in a easy to use interface .

Here are a few benefits to you:

Easily Change The Look – there are thousands of templates to choose from, so if you feel like changing the look of your site, it’s very easy

Hundreds of Plug Ins – want a photo gallery or E-commerce, there are plug ins already available for that, no need to have someone develop that for you

Don’t Need To Be an HTML Expert – you don’t need to know how to bold or underline text, add hyperlinks. The interface is easy to use that anyone can learn how to tweak the wording of any page.

In 3 easy steps we can have a company on its way to owning and managing its own professionally developed website.

1. Pick your own site name (www.yourcompany.com)
2. Choose a Joomla Template
3. Provide us your company logo and page(s) content


And if you don’t have time to manage your site, we offer a hosting NerdCare that includes such disaster recovery, hack detection, 24/7 monitoring of your website and best of all contact changes.

If we can help out, please email us at development@nerdsonsite.com