I am surprised that this was so hard to find and yet so simple to do. I have always been so worried about changing the menu structure on my Joomla! site. This is because of the possibility of search engine links/back links to my site could get broken if I do. So what is the answer? You could go with sh404SEF or Artio JoomSEF or any other of the extensions listed at http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef. However, many of these are overkill for a simple redirect.

That’s why I went with JRedirect. It is a very simple plugin that you “set and forget.” It is as easy to use as it is to install and gets the job done beautifully. I needed to redirect http://www.mysite.com/students/the-forum.html to it’s new URL of http://www.mysite.com/forum.html. I tried using sh404SEF as well as Artio, but they were either too complicated to perform such a minuscule task, or to complicated to figure out in the amount of time I had. JRedirect was so simple and I had it done in 2 minutes after installing the plugin. It is set within the plugin parameters (of course) like this oldurl|newurl (they are seprated by the pipe, the shifted character on the backslash key). That simple. No user groups to set, no piles of old URLs to search through to find the one I needed to redirect (sh404SEF!!!). Plain old simplicity at it’s finest. In my case, it looked like this:

students/the-forum.html|/forum.html

Please note the order here. You leave off the root of http://www.mysite.com/ and just take what is after it. Then, in the second URL you make relative to the site root as well, but with the / in place, otherwise it would redirect you to http://www.mysite.com/students/forum.html rather than http://www.mysite.com/forum.html.

JRedirect in Action

Enjoy!

After about an hour of Google-Fu and some serious command line searching, I finally came up with how to add a logout link to your JomSocial menu so that it will appear on every page. Pretty simple, now that I know how to do it – but isn’t that how everything works? Here it is.

$defaultCoreMenuArray['Logout']  = $this->_addDefaultItem(
JText::_('Logout'),
CRoute::_('index.php?option=com_user&view=login')
);

Gain access to your components/com_community/libraries/toolbar.php (either via ssh or ftp) and add the above line of code starting at line 60, right below where it says:

switch ($key)
 {
 case TOOLBAR_HOME :
 $default->caption  = JText::_('CC HOME');
 $default->link  = CRoute::_(index.php?option=com_community&view=frontpage');

and your all set. You now have a Logout option under your home menu for JomSocial! Play with it a little bit, and you could potentially move the menu to the end of the line, so that it shows as a standalone top-menu item.

Logout menu shown for JomSocial

Enjoy!

Just 3 weeks after Joomla 1.5.12 was released, joomla.org released the 1.5.13 update that fixed some MAJOR security issues. However, along with this fix came some problems. One VERY LARGE problem, namely – Media Manager is now broken.

Well, there has been a fix already committed to the development branch of the 1.5.* SVN, but it has not been fixed in a release for the general public yet. I have updated my sites and fixed the issue, but I am sure that many of you out there are still struggling. So I have attached a .zip file that addresses the issue. This is the “unofficially official” fix for the issue. It is the EXACT SAME files that were updated in the SVN for 1.5. This WILL BE the fix that Joomla! implements in 1.5.14 (at least I am 99.99% sure that it will be.)

UPDATE - Joomla! 1.5.14 was released today, 7/31/09, and it DOES use this fix for the media manager. However, it also fixes a couple other things, so I would suggest using that upgrade patch instead of the files located at the bottom of the post. View the Joomla! release notes for 1.5.14 here, http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5244-joomla-1514-released.html.

Anyways, just download the .zip, unzip it, and upload it via FTP to the root directory of your Joomla! installation. Your FTP client will ask you if you want to overwrite some files, click yes, and you’re all set! (Trust me it works!) Anyways, to verify that this indeed fixes it, log into your Joomla! admin panel and go to media manager, and you will see the problem very clearly. Then do the fix, and refresh your media manager page. Vóila! Functioning Media Manager!

Enjoy!

Attachments:

administrator.zip – sha1 sum – f62ae2fdf768cd06ea18ae7475ad69b52d074f01

So, I am getting more and more familiar with ways to hack and take down Joomla sites because I have been doing research on how to make my site more secure. One thing that I encountered is what is known as SQL Injection. Basically, SQL injection uses “data input” areas of a site, such as log in pages and comment pages, to execute a SQL query. (google SQL injection for more info.)

You see, SQL injection takes a little bit of luck and genius to work. In order to execute a SQL command successfully with SQL injection, the hacker needs to know or somehow acquire the actual database names within the target site. Sounds pretty difficult? Not really. What makes this easy is that (just about) ALL Joomla installations use the same database (DB) names, so it makes the guessing process just a little bit easier. What Joomla does to combat this is to put a DB prefix in front of all the DB table names.

The thing is, Joomla automatically uses the same DB prefix, jos_, in every default installation, unless you tell it to use something different. So any hacker with a little knowledge of Joomla will already KNOW this information, and your site is no more secure because of it. So what you need to do is change all your DB prefixes to something a little harder to guess while still retaining all your information and not destroying your site.

Well, that is a little harder than it sounds, at least for me, so what I did was use this Joomla Component. It is called DB Admin. It automatically searches your DB and changes all occurrences of “jos_” (or whatever your current DB prefix is) to whatever prefix that you want. It is very easy and self explanatory.

I wanted to protect my Joomla installation from being hacked, so I went ahead and installed the component and implemented its function. Well, it didn’t go as smoothly as planned. I got the following error after running the component.

jtablesession::Store Failed
DB function failed with error number 1146
Table '*****_jo151.jos_session' doesn't exist SQL=INSERT INTO `jos_session` ( `session_id`,`time`,`username`,`gid`,`guest`,`client_id` ) VALUES ( '3uac8rbctofmccr7918tv4jkp6','1232994018','','0','1','0' )

I could not load ANY pages at all. No backend or frontend pages loaded AT ALL. Needless to say, I got a little worried. You see, the component not only searches your DB and makes the proper changes there, it also changes your configuration.php file located in your root Joomla directory. Well, at least it is supposed to. Mine updated, but it forgot to change everything. This is what my configuration.php file looked like after I ran the DB Admin tool.

This is wrong, and will give you the error that I referenced earlier. If you get this error, simply download your configuration.php file and make the following change.

Noticed where it used to say “var $dbprefix = ‘jos_’;” it now says “var $dbprefix = ‘*****_’;” where ***** is the prefix that I used for my DB. Rename your configuration.php to configuration_old.php (for easy restore purposes), re-upload the edited configuration.php file and you should be good to go!

Links:

http://joomla.daveslist.co.nz/demo/set-table-prefix/db-admin-set-table-prefix.php

I hope this solves any problems you may be having with DB Admin, and