How to keep hackers off your back end

Big thanks to my friend Allan for lagging up both the issue and this simple solution.

The Problem

Hackers who know or suspect your site is hosted in joomla! only have to type /administrator after your url to get to your admin login page. Hackers thrive on finding the (often short, often based around your name and other personal details) phrases needed to login and mess up your site.

Allan has had his site hacked in the past and had to spend a very long time restoring it.

It may be tempting to ask why hackers would bother to hack your site, especially if it's small. Well there are two sorts of hackers. First is the bloody-minded who think they are on a mission, providing a public service, like burglars who argue they are just testing people's alarms systems. They will do it "to teach you a lesson about web security". The second is more serious - organised criminals and international terrorists looking to use other people's web resources to make their own activities more difficult to trace.

Allan's Solution

JSecure Authentication is a simple plugin that requires someone to know an access key before they can see that login page. It's not bombproof but it's a useful extra layer and it's free and simple.

How I did it

1. Download the plugin from the Joomla! extensions database
   
2. Login as administrator
3. Extensions | Install
4. Browse - find the file you jsut downloaded - it's a zip but you don't need to unzip it.
5. Click "Upload File and Install"
6. Extensions | Plugin Manager find JSecure Authentication and click to edit
7. Set the Enabled option to "Yes"; change the key and REMEMBER WHAT YOU CHANGED IT TO!

That's it. Now, when you want to login as admin, you have to go to www.yourdomain.com/administrator?YOURKEY

Your key is vital - don't make it anyone's name, your place of birth or any word out of any dictionary. You should also change it regularly. But you know all that stuff because people are always telling us.

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.

Embedding a video in your Joomla! site

If you spend an hour or so putting together a short animation that encapsulates the deep foundations of your work, you might be excused for feeling a bit cheesed off when Joomla! repeatedly "loses" the embedded vid from your article.

I had uploaded the video to YouTube, whence it can be safely embedded into anything (I thought).

But Joomla!1.5 had other thoughts. Oh yes.

Joomla! was happy for me to click the "embed" button (the one with the piece of filmstrip for an icon) , enter the URL and size information, tell it I'd like it right-aligned so the text can wrap alongside it, embed it inside a table so I get even more layout control, and even preview it showing the lovely video in context in the article.

But there's clearly something evil lurking under the "Save" button in Article Edit. When you click that button, all is saved, except your video. Gone. Pining for the fijords.

A quick bit of googling shows that this is a common problem and most answers were along the lines of "turn off WYSIWIG". Given that I'm a non-techie (see, it says in my profile, see it?) and that this blog is first and foremost for fellow non-techies who are none-the-less trying to run their own Joomla! websites, that's not an option for us. Not having to edit raw html and style sheets is the reason we wanted a CMS in the first place.

So imagine my joy when I found Cory Webb's website full of Joomla! wisdom, including a link to download his plugin which will interpret any valid www.youtube.com url and show it on yoru article as the embedded video.

The only thing I had to do was edit the url: being in the uk, I get uk.youtube.com - changing it to www.youtube.com was easy and worked straight away.

It works inside tables, so putting it to the side with text next to it was easy. The only thing I'm not happy with is that you end up with YouTube's classic "8 other videos, funnier and on OUR website" so the risk is that viewers, who are a fickle lot, let's face it, will wander off rather than read my article and buy some real teambuilding.

The answer to that is to host the videos on my own site. There's plenty of room - my vids are small punchy home-made cartoons. As long as I don't find out that to do it Joomla! requires you to publish your website in Swahili and angle your computer at 37 degrees while typing...

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.
In case something's gone wrong by the time you get to my site, here's the cartoon:

Menus now highlight properly

I normally don't blog on the same blog twice a day - overkill and all that - but this has made a significant difference!

I said I'd be trying out the "alias" option to link the main menu to the top menu. I went through each item in the main menu, changed its type to "alias". In the screen that comes up you have a drop down box on the right where you choose the menu item to link it to. I linked each one to its twin in the top menu and now!!! when you select menu items, the choice is highlighted in the top menu, irrespective of which menu you picked it from!

This was a feature Guru Simon was telling me to implement last week! I had no idea how - it sounded to me like something that should happen automatically. As it rturns out, it was my ham-fisted first attempt at setting up the menus that put the kibosh on the function in the first place. I'll be doing all my menus by redirection from now on!

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.

Creating a Case Studies Page

I'd like your feedback on whether you think this layout works.

I already had a text document with case studies of organisations where I've helped increase a team's skills. Creating a new Section|Category called Case Studies|Teambuilding and a set of articles within it, pasting each case study into an article was easy. The formatting from my Open Office document was preserved with bold headers and bulleted points lists - relief!

I've added a new item to the Main Menu (Menus|Main Menu|New) and was then faced with a choice. The "new menu item" / "edit menu item" screens give you the option as to what kind of page that menu entry creates when clicked.

Category Blog / Section Blog displays the text of the articles up to the "read more" point, which you can put in as you edit the articles. I haven't, though I might. I can choose between single column and multi-column, I can choose how many have full text and how many are just titles and links. I can choose how many case studies are "leader" articles, i.e. are full-width articles above the lower-down, column-formatted ones.

Category List format displays just the list of titles of articles in the category. It's a lot cleaner, so I'm on that for now, pending experimenting with the "read more" business, which I'll blog here when I try it.

I found you can "copy" menu items from one menu to another, so I copied the Case Studies item from Main Menu to Top Menu; this made sure it was definitely the same thing I was creating on each menu. However, now I see there is an "alias" item which appears to allow you to "re-direct" from one to the other. The difference is that you only have one actual copy of the menu item - preventing them getting out of sync and saving space too presumably. I'll be playing with that next and will let you know how it goes.

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.

Multiple Home pages

Executive Summary (fancy speak for "summary")

Different menus had entries for "Home" but the page you got differed depending upon which one you clicked. I have solved the problem for now but still suspect there is a deeper issue to be solved.

The Story

I have a "main menu" and a "top menu". I also have a "breadcrumbs" which I did not realise until Guru Simon pointed it out to me. Yes, I'd heard the phrase (seen it in the "modules" menu in Joomla!, to be precise) and I knew about that string of links crossing the page under the header that showed you where you'd got to, but never connected the two.

So I have three places you can click to get to "Home". The problem was this: When you go directly to http://teamcoachingnetwork.com, you got the header, the articles, the menus, but also the "login" box, the info about who else is on the site (c'mon, everyone!) and the poll about what you think about training courses. On the other hand, when you clicked on Home in the top menu after going somewhere else, you don't get those extra items.

At first I thought there might be some other way to connect the menu items directly to the front page; maybe there is, and I'll try that later. What I did discover is that the appearance or not of modules, such as logins, polls, news stories, etc., can be selectively controlled from within the modules menu. My Menu items for Home can be ticked to appear in both version of the "home" page.

I went to Extensions|Module Manager|Polls(for instance) and at lower left I get "Menu Assignment". Using CTRL-leftclick I can select both the Home in my Mainmenu and Home in my Topmenu and voila - the poll appears in both home pages. I then repeated for the other items (Login and Who's Online).

Next thing to try is making the non-default pages simply links to the base domain http://teamcoachingnetwork.com and the upcoming news is about how my friend Jo managed to handle the tricky upgrade from 1 to 1.5 while preventing evildoers using her server to broadcast malicious spam.

'Til next time,

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.

The Front Page

Well, I promised you Guru Simon would be around last Friday and those of you watching (and I'm starting to see you guys linking across on Google Analytics)  may have spotted some subtle changes:

• the blurb with a geographic indication and a contact phone number at top right. I achieved this by using the "newsflash" module which normally occupies that spot and making the blurb the only news story available.
• the contact details - now the postal address and phone number are more obvious on the contact page. I did this in Components | Contacts | Contacts. Simon requires that I make the phone number a but more obvious - I'll have to work on this one.
• the pdf / print / email icons above each story were distracting, especially on the front page. They are made invisible on all articles via Content | Article Manager | Parameters. You could still specifically set the icons to be visible on specific articles but the general setting has made the front page a darned sight tidier.

Guru Simon pointed out that the template colours the headers in blue and this could be confusing as links are traditionally in blue, leading visitors to try to click onthe headings and get annoyed. Changing the template colour (Extensions|Template Manager|Milkyway|Edit|Color(sic) Variation) also changes all the hyperlinks to that colour too, so no joy there!

Clearly this is a job for delving back into the style sheets. I have already done some black magic editing html in the template files to get the company logo, company details in the footer, and the aforementioned Analytics code set up. I shouldn't be afraid, but CSS is just sooo scary!

BTW, I've sorted out more stuff so far than I can remember, and still haven't scratched the surface of what I could do on this website. If there's something you guys are struggling with, by all means comment it up here and we'll work it through together.

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.

The URLs Were Revolting!

So, as I was saying, Guru Simon was telling me my URLs are ugly and Google etc will not date them until they get a facelift.

A quick look on JoomlaForums showed a numebr of people asking about the problem and a mixed bag of replies ranging from "chk ur coking, ur cloacking iz rong" through to "your host is crap, come and buy some off me instead".

A quick look in Google brought me to http://docs.joomla.org/SEO

The problem is a compatitibility issue that crops up on some hosts but not others. The answer is not to go all Star Trek (pun on cloaking. Oh, you got it? Sorry.) The answer was simply to enter a short string into the configuration.php file in my home directory.


Here's what I had to do:

open up the filemanager of my hosting service
select configuration.php
copy it with the added suffix .bak (for safety)
change the permissions to 644 (to make it saveable when I edit it)
edit configuration.php
in the editor change var $live_site = ' ' to var $live_site = 'http://teamcoachingnetwork.com'
save configuration.php

in Joomla! administrator
select Site/global configuration
select seo-friendly urls
preview and enjoy your new SEO friendly urls!!!

Now I have gorgeous URLs that any search engine should be proud to take home to its parents, elt alone bump up the search rankings.

I cannot tell you how chuffed I feel that I sorted this myself and didn't need to wait until either my coffee appointment with Guru Si on Friday!

Or until someone on JoomlaForums sold me a new hosting package.

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.

So Little Time, but here it is anyway...

I didn't anticipate this: there's so much else going wrong and needing sorting, but I promised I'd tell you about Saturday night's big breakthrough - the underlying structural concept of Joomla! that enabled me to get my site started and up.

And it's simply this:

While conventional "web site design" software asks you to design pages, and then slots those pages into menus (think about iWeb, fellow Mac users), Joomla! asks you to create menus, then builds pages that respond to those menu items.

It build the pages out of articles you write in Joomla!.

The kind of page you get is chosen within the menu, not within the article. Choose a "blog layout" item, you'll get the headings and opening paragraphs of every article in that section of your website. Choose a "article" item, you'll get a single article for that page.

So to get started easily, here's what I did:

• write a small number of articles, do not classify them by category or section, tick them all as "front page" articles on the article editing page
  
• go to menu manager / main menu / menu items
• add each article as internal link / articles / article layout
• you now have a simple usable website with each page navigable either from its "blog" opening on the front page or from the left-hand menu.

What I'm struggling with right now is that my very good friend Simon who's an SEO wizard is telling me to get search-engine-friendly URLs, but every time I tick the box for it in Joomla! all my pages lose their formatting and go to (particluarly ugly) text format layout. Ug! More on that as I figure out how to sort it.

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.

How I got here

Back in March I was a a Chamber of Commerce networking breakfast when I chanced to have a brief conversation at the bacon counter with a friendly chap called Huw. He mentioned he was an IT consultant so I asked what sort of stuff he does. Lots of stuff mentioning MS. Disappointed, I briefly mentioned my wish that I could ditch MS software and go over to Linux on my main computer as well as my Dell Latitute laptop running Kubuntu. His eyes lit up - clearly a fan of Open Source.

In his follow up email he mentioned that there was a good OSS alternative to Sharepoint (I had no idea what Sharepoint was!!!!) called Plone and I might like to try it out. Fascinated, I downloaded Plone onto both my Latitude and my Powerbook G4 (no really, I'm not a techie, I'm a teambuilder) and started playing with it. Not bad, fairly straightforward. You create pages, you create folders, you upload media, users can register to access special parts of your website. Perfect, I think. I can have a public showcase area, then offer reports, advice, even training session outlines in exchange for email addresses.

So all I have to do is find a new hosting provider. My hosting had been with Tiscali UK since I started in 2003. They sent me details of how to log into the control panel for my 50MB (i.e. puny) hosting plan, but i lost those many years ago. Not with much hope, I emailed them several times to ask for details of how to access the control panel. I am still waiting. 8 months later. 8 flipping months. Tiscali. Still waiting. Remember that. Tiscali.

Uploading Plone to my Tiscali account is out of the question, since it is only 50MB (i.e. puny) and Plone itself seems to require not only half the interweb for itself but you have to have Python and Zope (programming languages) installed underneath ot for it to run. My only option was a new provider (which might have meant a new domain if I couldn't get hold of Tiscali to transfer the registration) or find another, simpler and smaller Content Management System.

So I started browsing. I already knew I wanted Moodle, especially when a contract came up in August where the client wanted online support and modules for their staff between training sessions. A search for Moodle hosting providers turned up a really nice guy called Prad at Forefront who set up a temporary subdomain on his own website for me to play with Moodle, (what a gent!) and offered me Joomla! bundled with Moodle as he didn't support Plone.

This is what got me playing with Joomla!. I downloaded it (again to both notebooks- the Lat and the Mac) and started trying to create a website.

And that's when I hit the wall. There was nothing to show me that Joomla! was bascially the other way around from Plone and from traditional Web Editing software. I have struggled with this since July, and Saturday night the light went on. Now I see it. now I understand. And I'll tell you all about that in the next post.

Meanwhile - on 22nd October I buy myself a hosting package on inmotion. I have to say, what you get is astonishing - the space, the bandwidth, the subdomains, the additional domains, the software you can have automatically installed (in seconds) into any subfolder you want in your site. So naturally I get myself a bit of Moodle and oh, look, there's Joomla! as well, yes I'll have those please.

The final part of the jigsaw - Tiscali still not replying to my emails or phone calls. Whois tells me my domain was being managed by Total Registrations, so i emailed them but they said they can't do anything without being told to by Tiscali and said I should email naming@telinco.net - on;y one problem - that's the very email address I've been writing to since July and not getting a reply. Total kindly pass on my message asking for the pointers to be moved to Inmotion and at last I have my domain on my new host on 28th November.

The website that was up until last Saturday was the static one I'd FTPd across from Tiscali - -written in glorious Open Office Writer no less! A source of pride for having achieved it but it looked awful. It looked awful even when it was new. It gave me no defence when designers rang up and said "your website is awful, can we improve it for you?"

Well! That's that lot off my chest. It's been an interesting 9 months and who knows how long the rest of my journey will take. I promise to tell you the deep fundamental secret of Joomla! next post. I know many fo you will read it and say "Well, we knew that!" but I didn't and that menas other people didn't, and that's what this blog is for.

If anyone starts reading this, do please leave a comment, however brief, or go to the website and register if you like.

And I still have no idea what Sharepoint is!

'Til next time

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.

I think I'm starting to understand...

Crikey! I've been playing with Joomla! and a couple of other Content Management Systems for months now, and last night I had the first breakthrough!

The documentation for new users has been more confusing than helpful to me; I'm one of those bog-picture thinkers. It's no good saying to me "go there, do that, click that button, upload your text here, change that PHP setting". I need to understand how the whole thing links together before I can start.

Last night's breakthrough means I was able to take the guts of my previous site and at least put them in a Joomla! framework; now I can steadily start adding more features using Joomla! as I get used to them.

In case any of you out there are struggling to come to terms with the conceptualisation of Joomla! (just lost myself 4m readers, there, right? "conceptualisation of Joomla!"? What the heck am I talking about?) I've decided to start a blog to

• record my progress so far
• share with other struggling beginners how to get your Joomla! site up and running
• share with you my progress and findings as I enhance the site in future

In my next post I am going to tell you how I got into this pickle in the first place, then what I think the Joomla! beginners' manuals should be telling us but which I cannot find anywhere.

This blog is for

• people new to Joomla! and struggling to understand the overall concept
• people who write Joomla! documentation and want to understand what beginners need to know
• anyone else. I'm not that fussy!

Enjoy

Dave

The site is at http://teamcoachingnetwork.com
Joomla! is based at http://joomla.org