BuyHTTP Company Blog

Joomla has released 1.5.16, a security release in the 1.5 line. All versions of 1.5 are affected and all users are encouraged to upgrade.

One of our clients has written up a good overview of how to quickly and easily turn your Joomla 1.5 installation into a multi-site setup. The basic steps:

1. Setup Joomla on your main domain
2. Park the second domain on your main domain
3. Add a php header redirect to your template’s index.php file

If you want multiple templates for each site that is also easy to control. So if you need to control multiple sites from one Joomla installation, this will work perfectly for you.

View the writeup at docs.joomla.org.

So you’ve decided you want to make a site with WordPress, that’s the easy part. How do you get traffic to it? The most obvious answers are SEO and link building, but both of those require lots of time to produce and visible results. The easy way is to let your visitors do the promotion for you by leveraging social networking and bookmarking.

Social Networking

Users of social networks like Facebook and Twitter are very curious and love to click links making them sources for driving huge amounts of traffic. There are several plugins available for adding Facebook links to your blog posts automatically. One of the most downloaded and, in our opinion, better plugins is Add To Facebook. Twitter traffic is even more powerful. Two plugins that we recommend are TwitThis and TweetMeme.

Social Bookmarking

Allowing your users to easily add bookmarks to sites like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us can also be helpful in building traffic to your site. The well recognized king in this area is the Sociable plugin.

What We Use

Instead of cluttering the page with several plugins linking to all of these services we use ShareThis. You can customize the feel a little bit and it allows both Facebook and Twitter posting as well as social bookmarking.

Brian Teeman is running a Joomla developer showdown, similar to extension competitions that are done with other systems. These competitions often lead to some of the most used extensions so it will be exciting to see what will be produced. Visit his site for info on the competition and how to get involved.

Shortcodes allow you to show data simply by adding [shortcode] to your WordPress site. This article includes 9 very cool shortcodes you can add (it also shows the format for creating any of your own) and a list of already included shortcodes.

SEO is a critical part of getting people to your site and these WordPress plugins help you acheive your goals quickly and easily.

HeadSpace2

The most important on page factor in SEO today appears to be your title tag. HeadSpace2 allows you to easily control the layout of all title tags on your WordPress blog. Along with title tag management you can control all of your description tags which, while not very important in SEO, can be very important in attracting people to click your site in the SERPs.

Redirection

What happens when you change a post’s URL? Do you know when your visitors are getting 404 errors? With Redirection you get everything you need to easily redirect posts and log any 404 errors.

Meta Robots

Until Meta Robots there hasn’t been an easy way to keep WordPress from allowing the indexing of certain pages on your blog. Now you can easily prevent the indexing of any pages/posts on your blog.

SEO Slugs

Including works like “in” and “the” in your post slugs doesn’t really do your SEO any good. SEO Slugs automatically removes all of these types of words from your slugs.

If you are looking for any Joomla related services there is a new easier way to find what you are looking for. resources.joomla.org has been created due to intense community desire. This is also a great way to get your Joomla services company more exposure.

One very popular way for hackers to try to gain access to your Joomla administrator is to brute force attack to guess your password. Using this method they bombard your admin form with thousands of usernames/password until they find the right combination. Since Joomla doesn’t let you choose the admin username when installing they already know the username, this makes it twice as easy. Fortunately is is easy to add several layers of protection.

1. Change the admin username

The first step you should take is changing your admin username. Login to cPanel, go to phpMyAdmin, select your Joomla database, browse the jos_users table and edit user id 62, this is the original super admin user. Change the username to something other than admin. This step will already almost eliminate any chance of your login being guessed since most hackers will just use admin for the username.

2. Improve your admin password

Next you’ll want to make sure your admin password is sufficiently difficult to guess. You’ll want to have at least 8 characters with a mix of lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers and special characters. A good password generator can be found here.

3. Add .htaccess protection

The firewalls on our Joomla hosting accounts automatically check for failed login attempts on .htaccess logins, so potential hackers will automatically be blocked after 5 login attempts. To add .htaccess protection login to cPanel and click on the Protect a Directory button. There you will be able to select the directory to protect (in this case your “administrator” directory) and add users who can login.

Taking this steps will help protect your Joomla admin login from would-be hackers.

We get asked regularly how to add Google Analytics tracking to WordPress sites. A quick search of the WordPress plugins directory shows about 60 results for “Google Analytics” so there are no shortage of ways to add it. The plugin we prefer to use is WP Google Analytics. With WP Google Analytics you can not only add your tracking code easily you can choose to log 404 errors, searches and outgoing link clicks as well as disable tracking for any role you want, like administrators, editors, etc.

To install WP Google Analytics you just need to download the .zip file from the plugins directory, go to your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Plugins > New > Upload. Upload the .zip file and activate the plugin. You can then change the settings and insert your tracking code.

We get asked all the time how to add Google Analytics tracking to Joomla sites. Until now we’ve recommended doing it manually because that was the only way to get the code just above the </body> like Google recommends. All the modules would place the code in the middle of your page. There is a new plugin that allows you to get the code inserted just above the </body> without needing to edit the template file.

BIGSHOT Google Analytics is a free Joomla 1.5 native plugin that allows you to insert your Analytics tracking code from the administrator with no file editing required.

It would be nice if the plugin allowed the option to prevent it showing if you are logged in as various levels on the frontend if you didn’t want to track admin or editor visits.