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.

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.

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.

We first installed it on MamboDemo and noticed page loading times decrease between 90%-98%. We’re using about half of the server resources today that we were using yesterday. That’s a pretty impressive decrease.

The we decided to see what it would do on a high traffic site and popped it on MamboHUT. We got the same 90%+ decrease in page loading times. The impact on server load wasn’t as great, but that’s because we’re running phpAdsNew on MamboHUT as well and that is the cause of almost all of the load it creates.

We didn’t notice any bugs on either site and installation was a breeze. We highly recommend this component for use on our servers.

When uninstalling components it’s not at all unusual for them to leave their database tables behind. Many do this to help with upgrading, making it a simple uninstall/reinstall situation. But if you are completely uninstalling a component, make sure to check the database using phpMyAdmin as see if the tables have been removed as well.

There has been a lot of discussion lately on further securing your Joomla or Mambo installations and what can be done. We do everything possible at the server level but there are a few things that can done in your individual site to help ensure a hackless Joomla or Mambo existence.

This tip explains how to move your configuration.php file outside of your webroot as well as making it unwritable by the server. That makes it nearly impossible for someone to corrupt or gain access to the information in the file.

The first step is to move the file. Your webroot is /home/USERNAME/public_html, where USERNAME is your cPanel username. Joomla and Mambo can access files located at /home/USERNAME, but those files cannot be directly accessed from the internet. Login to your favorite FTP program and download your configuration.php from /home/USERNAME/public_html/configuration.php . Rename it to “site.conf” then upload it to /home/USERNAME/site.conf.

Now that we’ve uploaded it to the new location we need to edit the original configuration.php file. Open it in your favorite text editor and replace the contents of the file with the following:

 require( '/home/USERNAME/site.conf' );
?>

Make sure to replace USERNAME with your cPanel username. Then upload the new file to /home/USERNAME/public_html/configuration.php. At this point your site should still function normally.

Next, we need to make the file unwritable by the server. Most FTP programs allow you to do this. Right-click on the /home/USERNAME/site.conf file and select the option to edit permissions (normally “Permissions” or “Info”) and change the permissions to 444. This lets the server read the file without any problems, but it will not be able to edit the file.

If you ever need to edit the file you will need to change the permissions back to 644 before making your changes.

You can view the thread that inspired this post at http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,122450.0.html