Flash and Joomla News by Eyezberg

Joomla now and when

1. Joomla! 1.0.x

• 12 versions in 12 months, means a lot of updates, which sometimes did break things when they were supposed to fix... of course, it is necessary to close security holes asap, but this should be prioritized by the whole team then , tested, and other considerations put on hold. 9011 Posts in Upgrade forums.
  
• More and more sites hacked / cracked (7314 Posts in Security Forums) lately: this indicates Joomla! is very popular, but also indicates there are serious concerns about security issues, no mater if it's in core as my own logs seem to indicate, or in 3rd party extensions.

Conclusion:

• as good as it is, either 1.0 gets some more serious attention, or it's obsolete compared to the new framework being coded for 1.5.The register_globals setting just made a major mess out of many components. Maybe it is a bad setting, but .x versions are not supposed to do that, and this is an officially recommended setting now.
• security concerns shouldn't be left to recommendations on the forums for users to look up; get 1.0.x tight against known hack attempts, and bug free if possible, and then integrate all possible recommendations into the code, maybe even a new section under Help integrating the other recommendations, so users do not have to go look for them.
  Edit 09/09/06: point just proven for example by this forum post...
  

2. The retrospective

Although a nice article, I don't really like a few parts of it.

• This article explains 1.5 is (going to be sometime) the new project which will finally differentiate Joomla! from Mambo.
  Johan says that when starting dev again as the new Joomla! team, they decided to "choose a safer solution by doing a short and quick release", that "international community pressure, especially from the French community, convinced [them] to go for a shorter release cycle", and that "it would soon become clear that this was a vital mistake." Maybe that became clear, but it wasn't communicated, and this article makes it kinda look like this was mainly the "French community pressure" which led to wrong decisions.
  This pressure was indeed high, because it was left over from before the split/fork/spoon, when word was out Mambo 4.5.3, which included an internationalized administration, would be released soon (at least beta); SVN (CVS then) was already looking good.
  Back then, a translatable admin was available as a core hack; hard to maintain, yet widely used by international communities. We all know what core hacks are: mostly trouble and update problems. Where are we today, over a year later? Right at the same spot: either using a core hack, or hardcoded translations, one per community (so you can't use admin with contributors speaking different languages).
  There are good reasons for 1.5, but it still would've been better after the 1.0 rebrand to get Mambo 4.5.3 code ready for release (coded by the same team, remember?), which would've eased the pressure for sure, gathered new steam; and THEN started the recoding of the core. Well, too late now.
• "1.5 still is a minor release.", expected to "keep a 80-90% backwards compatibility rate", as Johan says in this post . But then, in the same post "1.5 is a showcase of where we want to take the project. U could think about it as   our statement for the future. The concepts used in 1.5, the new framework, refactoring, ... are the groundwork for Joomla! 2.0."
  In the blog posting, the changes and recoding towards the new API / framework are described as finally starting on some of the points planned for Mambo 5!? You can't update a 1.0 site to 1.5, only migrate.
  I fail to see logic in all this.
  Either you realize (which apparently you did) the code needs a complete reworking; and take the decision the time has come to do so (that would've been a year ago). Then you tell everybody so,  start planning etc and get that killer version out, including the missing parts everybody agrees on (ACL, NBS, OOP and any other acronyms I might've missed here, internationalization of course). This would make a loong wait understandable.
  Or you use the existing code (4.5.3) to get a first version out with the announced and awaited major feature, even if it does not meet all future requierements, and go from there.
  
  You can't update to 1.5 as indicated before, and (from the blog) "Alot of the larger features (ACL, NBS,...) on our roadmap can't be implemented in a backwards compatible way" which means Joomla! 2.0 will requiere a new site again, and will break, again, many (?) existing extensions?! hum

3. Joomla! 1.5

Unfortunately, 4 months after the announced beta date, there's still no news about an ETA for the beta (I asked today ..).
Everything looks good to those who access SVN (developers, coders, some long-time users), but the awerage user has no idea when to expect what. But this is what users need and expect, Louis. Inside, first hand details and explanations. Don't just talk to the coders, they can indeed follow SVN, talk to the whole community about what's going on!

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Hacked, Cracked, whatever

Hacked, Cracked, whatever

In light of all the recent attacks on Joomla! and its extensions, new ways of securing sites need to be found quickly.
This very site was hacked (or cracked, as apparently it's now called -who cares) while still running 1.0.10 a week ago, while I was on hollidays without internet access.

To the hackers

(never heard anyone call themselves a cracker, so I'll keep using hacker):

Thanks for only changing the one frontpage article and not making a mess of all the rest.
This is the second time this site got hacked.
I offer tutorials and ressources about Flash and Joomla for free.
I really do not understand: how can anyone take pride in defacing or hacking such a site?
If someone can explain the mind and thoughts of such people to me?
In my opinion, it is as if a gangster walks around bragging how he robbed $0.50 from the homeless guy out in the street!
Shame on you. Just because you can, doesn't make it right, cool, or whatever.
Exploiting one single security hole on as many sites as possible is just plain stupid, waste of time and energy, anyone can.
If you got skillZ, contribute to the code. If not, you're a looser!

To the Joomla! developers and extension contributors

The current "stable" version 1.0.11 introduces recommendations for some settings to make sites more secure.
It seems strange to only have one (1) person working on the current version's SVN: Rey?! Is there still a team around?
It also seems strange, reading the purpose of the stability releases such as .11:

Maintenance Release Number (1.1.X)

An increment of the maintenance number usually indicates bug fixing within the minor release and possibly small enhancements and limited new features.

Fully backward compatible with previous maintenance increments.

to see code and recommendations introduced which (would) make this version not backwards compatible with previous versions at all, as it breaks some widely used extensions.

The last few updates have almost always introduced as many new bugs as they fixed bugs. It might be in the best interest of future users to focuse all efforts on making 1.5 beta / Stable, but as I said before, at the moment, millions of sites run on 1.0.x. This code needs better updates. Not new features, just all bugs fixed / no new ones introduced.

Once a site gets hacked, from the users perspective it doesn't make ANY difference if it's Joomla core or an extension at fault, the result is the same: site gone. Of course, it is easy to say, as during the last weeks, "Joomla 1.0.10 is secure, there are no known issues" and "only use trusted extensions". But looking at the changelog, it appears there were holes in the Core (ok, related to specific server settings, but not all users can change these, and "change host" is no real answer either..).

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The Joomla Family

The Joomla! Family 

Welcome to the happy Joomla! Family.
As you are our new neighbours, or maybe planning of moving in next door, let me explain how this family works.

First, there's the parents.

The parents rule the family. They take all decisions.
Mum and Dad are quite independent, each with his and her own ideas and wishes.
Dad is mostly at work (he's a coder), Mum rules the family.
Sometimes we don't understand why they do what they do, we wonder why they don't do what they said they would do.
Sometimes, they make us very happy by giving us a new toy to play with, or by fixing our favorite one when it's broken.
When we ask for new toys, we might get them, we might not, we never now.

The parents are not always the same.
Sometimes Dad moves out (new girlfriend maybe, or not enough love for Mum anymore); sometimes Mum leaves.
Sometimes we all move houses together, to a nicer new place.

Next, there is the grown-ups.

The grown-ups (we call some "3PDs") understand what Dad talks about at work.
They have the same job as him so they can communicate.

Sometimes, when they stay home long enough, and show enough knowledge in their discussions with Dad, he might invite them to join him.
But mostly, they have their own flats, which they try to keep tidy and work on decorating in an attractive way.
We like them, they are our models, and we like the toys they give to us.

Everyone can go to school and learn how to code.
But coding is hard, so many prefer to play.

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The Joomla Question

The Joomla Question - a personal opinion

What is Joomla?

For the time being, a renamed, rebranded, bugfixed CMS based on Mambo (plus the project structure, sites, and community around it). Many hours of work by many voluntary people. Yours for free.

What should it soon be?

If all goes well, the upcoming 1.5 version will

• lay the foundation of most future development work by providing a brand new framework with clean code,
• have an internationalised interface with UTF-8 based language support, and
• feature a new API for 3^rd party developers to hook into.

Where is 1.5 now?

You can take a look at the task list , where you can see what is complete, what is not yet started, an estimate of work hours etc..

You can also do some reading on the developer blog about some of the new features and changes.

Where is it supposed to be or go in the future?

Check out the roadmap, listing such nice things as

• the long requested « user and access control system » which Hannes is currently working on for his Google Summer of Code project,
• full version control of content which is very important in some business and governmental environments -as is also
• compliance and accessibility;
• multi-site capabilities;
• cross database support ...

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Favorite Mambots Part II

Favorite Mambots Part II

Since the last update to the list of Favorite Mambots, there have been quite a few new bots published.
In order not to make that first listing too long, I have decided to start this as a second part.
As it stands, the first part already caused out-of-memory alerts on every update, so I'll lleave it as is and continue here.
Suggestions always welcome

1. SocioTag 1.2
   

   Places icons linking to SocialBooking sites (del.ici.ous , furl, blinklist, etc) into your content. Aligns left or right, allows custom css and the option to decide which content you want the 'Sociotag' to be activated in.

2. AdSense 4Joomla

   Display your ads anywhere in your Joomla site, from a Module or directly merged within your Content. - Display Ads, Adlinks or the Google Search form. All of this with only one plugin. - Manage multiple AdSense formats, you can set up to three Ad Layouts and two AdLinks to display. - Define and include your channels, to track your visitors response.
   Free Lite version, commercial full version.

3. MjazTools Personalize

   Insert the current user's name or info in content items.
   Syntax: {username}, {name}, {email}, {usertype}, {registerdate}

4. MosModule

   Display nested articles, execute snippets written in PHP (without tags) and execute external php script filse with passed  parameters (with tags).
   Please take a look at the included readme for full details.

5. MosImageLink

   Adds a link to the first image found in the introtext in the blog-view to the full view of the content item.
   It checks for the HTML-Imagetag and the MosImage Mambot-Tag.

6. SMF Authorbot

   Creates a link from article authors back to their SMF profile. Decided to include here even if not standalone (as forum needed) because it is a nice idea and I would use it if I had a usage for SMF..

7. autoGoogle

   Performs a Google search on any keyword the author specified in the backend.
   Clicking any green linked word in an artcile will open the Google search results page for that term.

8. ROK

   1. RokGuest

      Show certain portions of a content item to people who are not logged-in. Logged-in users will not see this content.

   2. RokMember

      Show certain portions of a content item to people who are logged-in. Guest users will not see this content.

   3. RokTextile

      Provides Textile functionality for content using TextilePHP by Jim Riggs of jimandlissa.com which in turn is a PHP implementation of the Textile shorthand syntax. Textile is used to create valid (X)HTML output without using HTML markup.

9. RequestFilter

   Security plugin!
   This System bot should break attempts to specify values of configuration parameters via POST or GET queries. The plugin will search through the $_REQUEST array to check standard variables such as option, task, no_html, Itemid, id etc. for any url links. In case it finds anything, it will return an error 403 code and then stop the script. Also it will block any attempts to pass the parameters mosConfig_absolute_path and mosConfig_cachepath through GET or POST requests.

10. Xevidwidebot

    Displays Adobe Flash .flv Videos and High Definition Movies in your content items.
    Progressive streaming of FLV Videos (also High Definition), play and pause, Autoplay mode, Volume Control, Title description, Backgroundcolor settings, Popup supported, resize movie width and height...
    Commercial.

11. MultiThumb

    Automatically creates thumbnails and optionally creates popups to the original images in three different ways:
    1. Normal popup in new window
    2. Lightbox popups with picture grouping (image sets)
    3. Thumbnail expansion

12. Jombackup

    Perform automated daily mysql backups and email them to the address of your choice.
    Make sure you visit Mambots->Site mambots and click on the link to JomBackup system plugin to edit & publish it. Plenty of configuration options available!
    It runs every time Joomla is run. Most of the time, all it will do is check for the existance of a checkfile with today's date. If the file exists it will not do anything else, however if the file doesn't exist (IE the local server's time has passed the midnight hour and this is the first time today the site has been visited) then the plugin will perform a backup of the system's mysql data and email it to either the system default email address, or another that you may have specified in the config.
    No tag needed. Very quick and effective, used here: thanks, Vimes!
    

13. Tabs In Content

    Easily add content tabs within standard Joomla content items.
    The tabs simulate a multi-page structure, inside a single page! Very nice piece of code!
    Demo site.

14. J!Tags

    Automatically adds a tagline at the end of your content that links to Technorati.
    The keywords in the tagline are created from the metakeywords for the content item.
    No tag needed, just publish after install.
    

15. Xe-Flickr

    Free plugin to add a Flickr photo slideshow into your content.
    Syntax: { xeflickrbot}31955346@N00{/xeflickrbot }
    

16. RegistrationBlocker

    Prevent certain usernames from being registered. For example, you might not want someone to register by the name of "webmaster" or "admin" since it could give other users wrong ideas about their identity.
    Block one or more usernames. All you have to do is to enter the usernames in the mambot's backend, one on each line. You can even use an asterisk as a wildcard for blocking a whole range of usernames. For example, if you enter admin* in the list, you will block usernames beginning with admin like admin, administrator, administration and so forth. With *admin* you will block all names containing admin, like siteadministrator etc. Usernames are case INsensitive.
    Bonus: RegistrationBlocker works with the standard login component and with Community Builder.
    Thanks, marlar
    

17. TheYard Bots

1. Jx Rot 13
   Crypts the text of content items with the very simple rot13 algorithm which rotates the alphabet 13 (or a selected number) letters to the left or right.
2. Jx Leet Speak
   Translates all content items into leet speak.
3. Jx Title Flag
   Displays a specified flag before or after the content title, or the default flag from the plugin's settings when a specific flag is not given.
4. Jx Show URL
   Prints the URL to the content item above or below the content.
5. Jx Simple Grade
   Add a review grade image to content items.

18. FrontpageBanner

    Show the active banners after first news item on frontpage

19. MosSnippet

    Insert text, html or php code in content. You can create up to 15 snippets using the fields in the mambot editor. You insert the snippets in content by referring to the number or an optional name. For example, {snippet 1} or {snippet paypal}. When processed, the tags will be replaced with the snippet in question. Text and html code will be inserted unaltered, while php code will be interpreted.

20. Googlemaps

    Easily add one or more Google map(s) into your content. You can set width, heigth, latitude, Longitude, zoomtype, initial zoom level, text displayed in a marker and of course the google api key. These parameters can also be set as default in the administrator of Joomla at the plugin.
    Syntax: {mosmap width='500'|height='400'|lat='52.052312'|lon='4.447141'|zoom='3'| zoomType='Large'|zoomNew='0'|mapType='Satellite'| showMaptype='1'|overview='0'|text='sv DWO'|key=''}
    Notes: you need a Google API key to use this, you should read the documentation about the parameters, and the easiest way to get precise long. & lat. seems to be Google Earth
    

21. Component bot

    This may be very handy for some of you: include component output into a content item!
    Note: link is the a forum post with the download attached, if you don't see it, you'll need to register!
    Syntax: {component}url{/component} where url is relative url to your component WITHOUT "index.php?"
    Example: {component}option=com_blabla&Itemid=73&album=7{/component}

22. Simple gallery in Content

    Very nice gallery which couldn't be easier to use in your content:
    Syntax:
    
23. TBC..
    

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Flash Quiz

Flash Quiz 

First in the new series of Flash products for Joomla reviewd here, let's take a look at this great FlashQuiz component by ElearningForce.dk

FlashQuiz is a very complete component with A LOT of options. The admin interface is impressive.

Usage of Flash serves it's purpose well: you link a Quiz from the menu, and the user stays on the same page untill the end of  the Quiz, it's a seamless experience thanks to the SWF frontend.

Using Flashs drag and drop  behaviours, you can set up questions to match items; you also can use it to highlight specific areas designed as hotspots, things very simple to set up from the backend but very impressive when used!

ElearningForce provide quite a few tutorials about the various settings and setup options to get you using the component quickly, you can also test a demo.

Everything is so well integrated into Joomla it's a pleasure to use. 

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Site News

Site News July 2006

Lately I've had a bit of time to add new content to the site and install some updates.

Updates to functionality include:

• Joomla! 1.0.10

• Tags newest release & "bot in modules" fix (thanks again, Phil!)
• Jom Comment latest release with AJAX-powered show hide features and Gravatar support
• SEF Advance update which now is compatible with JoomFish!
• AlphaContent update to latest version

Thanks to all developpers for their ongoing efforts and great products!

Updates to content include:

• almost all Flash Guru profiles completed and a few more added (more to come), up to almost 80 gurus & goddesses
• some more SWF animations, games etc added (registered users only because of bandwidth!)
• started translation into French, menus, module titles and other shorter strings should be ok, still need to do the articles.
  
• added some more Flash Games and links etc.. browse around!

Thank you for stopping by, remember there are specific RSS feeds for Flash, SWF and Joomla sections separately if you're only interested in part of the content here. Else, use the main feed which includes most news (but not all!).

 

If you are registered don't miss the "Store Wars" SWF. It's a great Star Wars parody!

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Credits

Some details about this site:

I use Joomla! as the Content Management System.

This is enhanced by a few extensions, both free and commercial.
Thank you to all the developers.

• SEF Advance URL rewriting by Emir Sakic
• AlphaContent article listing by Visualclinic.fr
• Jom Commentscommeting system by Azrul
• Many Mambots listed under My Favorite Bots
• Joomap Sitemap by Daniel
• RD RSS component for additional feeds of selected content by Run Digital
  
• JA Hadar template (modified) by Joomlart (as of 05/06)
• ... to be completed ...
  

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Joomla Menus

Joomla! Menus... collections of links to various parts of your site, or even to other sites.

The most important menu is the mainmenu. This comes with a default install and can not be deleted. Each menu you find in the Menu Manager has an associated module in the Module Manager. Each new menu you create also creates a new module. Each menu you delete also deletes the module. So first thing to remember is the tight link between a menu and its module.

Consequence: when you configure and manage your menu (links), you will have to adjust settings in (at least) two different places: the menu item, and the module for this menu. Ex.: you create a new item with a menu image. If you don't set the Show Menu Images parameter to yes in the module settings, the image won't be visible!

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404

You have unfortunately reached a page from which there is no escape!

No way back to the homepage, no menu, nothing!

Just this link here: Sitemap

As this site is being rebuilt from the ground up, many previously Google-indexed pages do not exist anymore.
If recreated, their titles and links are likely to change. Please update your bookmarks.

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