theCancerus

Category: joomla

  • Media Manager Browse Button Disabled In Joomla

    Problem : No matter how many time you click on the media manager’s browse button nothing happens. It used to work few days back but not any more.

    It is as if the the media manager buttons has been disabled.

    media_manager_problem

    If you were facing these problems it is most probably due to the Flash uploader not working properly with Flash version installed on your system.

    Solution:

    The simplest solution to fix this issue is to go to,

    Global Configuration –> Systems –>Media settings.

    And select ‘No’ for ‘Enable Flash Uploader’ setting, and save the settings.

    mediamanager_config

    That’s it, this simple. Now go back to you media manager and upload files to your heart’s content.

  • Joomla Day Pune(India)

    On 25th April 2009 we hosted first ever Joomla Day in India. This was made possible by support of Parth and Ashwin who forced me to also think about Joomla Day in last years PHPCamp, where we were planning for Drupal camp.

    They were later joined by Shardul, who was already pushing for Joomla day in India at events forum in joomla.org. He was the person who was on our first coffee meet to discuss how to get going so that we get official approval from OSM. He also pushed me to create and register Joomla User Group Pune, for the event.

    We met multiple times to talk and plan how things should happen.Volunteers Team on 24th evening for Joomla day

    In middle of all this, out of nowhere, Mangesh joined us. He was instrumental in actually making joomladay.co.in website usable, as Ashwin and Parth could not give the time and attention to it. He also ended up hosting the website on his server, when we started having trouble with dream host.

    With organizers team ready, we needed few volunteers,  this is where Tara came into picture, he helped us with venue and insisted that we give I2IT a try. Krity worked on the content of the website and faq’s. Kinjal helped us with photographs, Rucha and Shruti helped us managing the registrations on the day of event.

    Finally I want to thank Toby Patterson for coming all the way from Thailand to help us with Joomla Day.

    Guys to stay updated about Joomla User Group Pune activity follow us on Twitter or Subscribe to our google group mailing list as Joomla Day is just an start.

  • Preventing SQL Injection Attacks on your Joomla! Websites

    (This is promotional article taken from Joomla! Web Security )

    Joomla!, a very popular content management system (CMS) is as you may know an easy-to-deploy-and-use content management system. This ease of use has lent itself to rapid growth of both the CMS and extensions for it. You can install it on almost any host, running Linux or Windows. This highly versatile software has found itself in such lofty places as large corporate web portals, and humble places such as the simple blog.

    Joomla! itself is inherently safe, but misconfigurations of the CMS, vulnerable components, hosts that are poorly configured, and weak passwords can all contribute to the downfall of your site. Hence, it’s always better to ensure the security of your site.

    In this article by Tom Canavan, we will take a look at how SQL injection attacks can occur to your Joomla website, how we can test for SQL injection attacks, and how to stop SQL injection.

    Introduction

    Mark Twain once said, “There are only two certainties in life-death and taxes.” Even in web security there are two certainties: It’s not “if you are attacked”, but “when and how” your site will be taken advantage of.

    There are several types of attacks that your Joomla! site may be vulnerable to such as CSRF, Buffer Overflows, Blind SQL Injection, Denial of Service, and others that are yet to be found.

    The top issues in PHP-based websites are:

    • Incorrect or invalid (intentional or unintentional) input
    • Access control vulnerabilities
    • Session hijacks and attempts on session IDs
    • SQL Injection and Blind SQL Injection
    • Incorrect or ignored PHP configuration settings
    • Divulging too much in error messages and poor error handling
    • Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
    • Cross Site Request Forgery, that is CSRF (one-click attack)

    SQL Injections

    SQL databases are the heart of Joomla! CMS. The database holds the content, the users’ IDs, the settings, and more. To gain access to this valuable resource is the ultimate prize of the hacker. Accessing this can gain him/her an administrative access that can gather private information such as usernames and passwords, and can allow any number of bad things to happen. When you make a request of a page on Joomla!, it forms a “query” or a question for the database. The database is unsuspecting that you may be asking a malformed question and will attempt to process whatever the query is. Often, the developers do not construct their code to watch for this type of an attack. In fact, in the month of February 2008, twenty-one new SQL Injection vulnerabilities were discovered in the Joomla! land. The following are some examples presented for your edification. Using any of these for any purpose is solely your responsibility and not mine:

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  • my article on PuneTech

    I have written a simple introduction to Joomla for PuneTech, check out the article on PuneTech.

    And leave some comments their.

  • akTweeter Simplest Way To Show Tweets

    For those in hurry download [download#16#nohits] now.

    It is a simple Joomla 1.5 module to display Tweets on a topic or event.

    What it does?

    akTweeter uses Twitter search to show latest 5 tweets, on any topic that you want to show tweets about. aktweeter simplest way to display tweets It is useful if you want to display tweets on some event or your product.

    Requirements

    This module is compatible with Joomla 1.5 only and released under GPLv2 License agreement.

    Are you satisfied with your knowledge? No, then spent 15 minutes every day on PHPCamp.net a knowledge sharing website for our own PHP community

    How to use it?

    1. First of all download [download#16#nohits] module and install it.
    2. Go to module manager and activate the akTweeter Module.
    3. Finally, edit the module and set the keyword you want to monitor.
      aktweeter configuration

    That’s it, you are done.

    If you liked it, hated it or have any suggestions just leave a comment below.

  • Joomla: Request To Response

    To do development work in any framework, it is a good idea to first study the request flow. This basically answers the question ‘what happens between request send to server and request received from the server?’.

    COPYRIGHT NOTICE

    I have made the Flow Diagram available here for public use and/or modifications, as long as you cite me as an author. Although I have decided to share this, it took awhile to create this version, so I would appreciate getting some credit for my work.

    Please refer to the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-share Alike license:

    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

    You are free to share and make derivatives (i.e. corrections or updates), as long as you include a revision history, attribute the contributors as authors, you do not use it for commercial purposes, and you freely share the document.

    You can download the request to response flow diagram as [download#14#nohits] or as [download#15#nohits].

    Here is what happens in case of Joomla 1.5…

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  • Parsing RSS Feeds Inside Your Joomla Modules or Components

    In Joomla 1.0.x it was a bit difficult to parse a RSS feed file inside you component. If you wanted to do that you need to include either SimplePie or some other RSS parsing library  inside your component.

    This is not the difficult part, difficult part was that, it might conflict with some other component or module that might also be using the same library.

    In Joomla 1.5 you don’t have to worry about this issue any more. It now includes SimplePie library in the framework itself.

    To use the library that comes with Joomla all you need to do is

    jimport('simplepie.simplepie');

    this will include the SimplePie library in you component or module.

    Afterwards you can just create a SimplePie object start and using all the functions. In case you don’t know, here is how you can do that

    $feed=new SimplePie();

    Neat and simple isn’t it?

    PS based on this information I have created a simple module to display new 20 tweets for a particular event, which I will be sharing in next few days.

  • Enable Your Joomla To Write In Hindi, Marathi, Bengoli, Gujarati, Malyalam, Telugu and Punjabi

    UPDATE: This article is compatible only upto Joomla 1.5.12. I will make it compatible to latest version of Joomla as soon as i have time. Thank you.


    Recently I was required to give a presentation to an agricultural college, they wanted to create a website for their college in Marathi, which resulted in akIndicPlugin for tinyMCE as Joomla uses it as default editor.

    Here is how you can enable Joomla to write in Indian languages.

    Step 1:Install akIndicPlugin for tinyMCE

    Upload files to webserver,

    • Download the akIndicPlugin
    • Extract the archive using winzip etc. in a folder named akindicplugin
    • Now FTP the akindicplugin  folder and all files inside it, to “pluginseditorstinymcejscriptstiny_mceplugins” in case of Joomla 1.5.x or “mambotseditorstinymcejscriptstiny_mceplugins” in case of Joomla 1.0.x, using Filezilla.

    Modify the ‘tinymce.php‘ file

    • Open tinymce.php file in “editorstinymce” in  Notepad++ or your favorite editor.
    • In Joomla 1.0.x find $buttons2     = implode( ‘, ‘, $buttons2 ); or goto line number 250. In case of Joomla 1.5.x  find $buttons2[] = ‘forecolor’; or goto line number 190.
    • Add following lines at specified line numbers
    $plugins[]            = 'akindicplugin';
  $buttons3[]            = 'akindicplugin';
    • Save the file, and upload to webserver.

    Once you are done, login to Joomla administrator panel and check tinyMCE, if you see a button on tinyMCE toolbar, Congratulations! you have finished the first step.

    akIndicPlugin for tinyMCE in joomla

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  • 5 key skills of a successful web application developer

    Most probably you will be knowing about all these skills already, it is common sense, still I have found so many developers who just know just one server side language(usually java or .net) and then they think themselves as superman/superwoman.

    In web application development, that is just one thing. You need to know about lot more things before you can consider yourself successful.

    So, if you know them already that’s good, you don’t need to read any further otherwise continue reading to know why each of these skills are important for you(the web developer).

    Here are the skills

    1. the structure : HTML
    2. the presentation: CSS
    3. the behavior: JavaScript

    With these three skill you have ability to become the super cool static website developer or a front end developer

    1. the database: SQL
    2. the server-side language : PHP( other options are JSP/ASP/PERL/RUBY choice is yours, as all the fight for best happens here)

    These two skill will make you a web developer.

    All five of these skills will make you a most prized web developer, in your organization.

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  • akJoomGallery : simple image gallery for Joomla

    Update: released the  version 1.1.0 with updated prettyPhoto and jQuery plugin. Download link below now links to updated version. If you need to download the old version from google code.

    Adding image galleries inside your Joomla! pages is now super simple with the “akJoomGallery” Plugin.

    You don’t need a specialist knowledge to use this mambot/plugin. akJoomGallery allows you to use images in your content item as image gallery. With it’s help you can convert any content item/page into a cool image gallery.

    The idea for this plugin came to my mind when we needed to show a quick image gallery to client, and we need something lightweight, with more control over how the image is shown in the gallery page itself. We could have used other big gallery components but I was not interested in something simple and quick. Check out the implementation of akJoomGallery.

    akJoomGallery

    This plugin is best suited to those situations where someone want’s to add few thumbnails while writing the content, and would like to display the large size images when users clicks on them, without leaving the page.

    How To Install

    1. Just download the akJoomGallery plugin.
      1. [download#8#nohits]
      2. [download#9#nohits]
    2. In Administration panel of Joomla goto Installers ->Mambots(for Joomla 1.0.x) or to Extensions -> Install/Uninstall(for Joomla 1.5.x) .
    3. Upload this package file and Install.
    4. Now go to Mambots -> Site Mambots ->akJoomGallery or Extensions -> Plugin Manager->content – akJoomGallery and publish/enable the plugin based on the version you are using.

    akJoomGallery: Simple Image Gallery For Joomla

    Now, enjoy the simplest image gallery with lightbox effect.

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