Okay, you've installed your Joomla site, and want to began to master it. You click on the administrator link in the frontend and instantly hit the wall: a blank page is showing up. What's the deal? The cause is generally simple: This is happening almost always because your 'live-site' setting in your configuration.php file doesn't correspond with your Administration URL. You either have a www in your live-site setting in your configuration.php file and you are accessing your administration backend without the www or vice versa. It's highly recommended to correct this, the problem can impact even your site's Google rating.

If you run a Joomla site where you want the new content items by default to be published on the frontpage, you're out of luck, this is something Joomla don't let you set in some config file. In the normal Joomla work-flow the Publisher (or someone ranked higher) will decide/need to decide if and when put a given content item in the frontpage. You may need this (or you're bored already needing to go back again and again in editing mode just to click on that select box...).

This tip is only for Joomla 1.0! For newer versions the handling of bandwidth is more cleverly solved, so read on only if you still use Joomla 1.0.

Do you have some old Joomla site (pre Joomla 1.5.6)? then is very likely you will got - or already have - a site running only halfway, full of errors saying

or

Yeah, you might allready guessed it, the PHP 4.* end of life-cycle is wreaking havoc in Joomla 1.0 sites and some early Joomla 1.5 implementations - or even newer sites, having badly coded third party extensions installed.

In another post about Function eregi() deprecated I provided some readily fixed Joomla 1.0 files to overcome issues related with upgrading to PHP 5.3 for Joomla 1.0 sites. But since a Joomla site is not built only from the core code, but there are other third party add-ons too, not only these older Joomla sites can be plagued by bad coding practices. The most problematic issues are related with templates. Most of the addons are fixed already, but you might have templates with unsupported functions. Here are couple of tricks wich might help you fix them!

This is a key security issue, but unfortunately many of the Joomla site-owners need guidance on this.

First, let's see what you should know:

Joomla is a typical LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) application, even if runs on many other platforms too. The entire access rights "philosophy" is relying on the native environment's settings.

Yep, that's something you can experience with any of your new templates, especially the ones with colored/dark background. Why this happening? And more important, how you can fix it?

The answer to the first question is simple: the 'WYSIWYG' editors used in Joomla are just doing what the name implies: are taking the template's CSS file and rendering the newly entered content to be as close to what will be shown on the site as possible. And if your template's background is colored or an image file is used to fill your background, then that will be used there too. The fix is relatively easy in the case of most current editors. Almost all of them have the possibility to use a special CSS file in the editing pages. Here we will show you the recipe that works for the family of editors based on TinyMCE editor, delivered by default with Joomla (as JCE), but the solution is similar or can be easily adapted for all such advanced editors.

Sometimes you need to find out the exact Joomla version for a website you don't own for a decent reason - like you are a freelancer and need to provide an estimation for a job on the respective site.

Sure, you can ask the owner ;) but that's the easy scenario.

Fortunately there are relatively easy - and legitimate - ways to find it out, unless the owner of the site hasn't blocked the access to this information. In my personal experience (believe me, I have some) this is rarely happening.

I did not realised until recently how hard may be even for some seasoned Joomla webmasters to get rid of that 'Welcome to the Frontpage' text from their Joomla site. But talking with couple of customers and being even hired for do this made me curious, and I Googled for 'Welcome to the Frontpage'...

The result may be surprise you... my last attempt ended on 25.000.000(no kidding...) hits.

So, there is the free-for-all recipe:

Joomla is a great piece of software, and the developers are deserved allready full support for keeping it evolving. One of the easy methods are to keep those Powered by Joomla texts and messages in place, and visible. But what if - with good reasons - you want to get rid of those? For example to make less obvious for Joomla-hackers to identify your site as a possible next target - to name only one of possible multiple reasons. (Read also this article about how to remove the Generated by Joomla! tag!) Or you may want to keep it, but a bit tweaked, to reflect better your contribution to that site of yours. The same questions are arising: where that footers are coming from?

You use Joomla? Huh... Me too... Did you know, that by this alone you became a potential target for some bad guys out there?

Like it or not, there are some nerds who are "specialized" themselves in hacking and cracking Joomla sites.

Scared? Not need too, just be cautious and take some countermeasures. What you can do about?

I was totally forgot about this problem - until this morning, when I found in my mailbox a request to save someone's old Joomla 1.0 based site from disaster. I was thinking, that until now all servers where upgraded to PHP 5.3 and all Joomla 1.0 sites upgraded - or at least patched to work with the new PHP.

Did you manage to lost your password? Worst, maybe you lost the Super Administrator password? And for some reason you can't use the retrieve lost password functionality of Joomla...  If you use Joomla, if you forget your password you could just simply click on the "Forgot password" menu, and the new password will be sent to your email address. But what if you can't remember the exact e-mail address, or you have a local, development version and did not have the mailer handy... or your Internet connection is down? Or, worse - happened to me couple of times - you need to overtake a site originally developed by someone else?

Mambots where the ancestors of current version Joomla plugins. Mambots were introduced in Mambo and offered possibilities to add plug-in logic to your site mainly for the purpose of manipulating content. As the smallest Joomla extensions, they where smaller or bigger chunks of code executed upon being triggered by specially formatted keywords/signal words inserted in the various places of a Joomla 1.0 site.

Did you received complaints from your AOL users that they have problems using your Joomla powered site? Did you read in Joomla forums that other users and administrators have the same problem, namely that the last few 1.0.x releases of Joomla do not properly support AOL users?

I did, and searched the web for some solution. This way I had came across the Eric's blog, where I found the following hack, which worked for me.

Joomla 1.5 and newer versions have full https support without any hacks being necessary. But what you can do if you want to run your Joomla 1.0 site over https for some reason? Upgrade it!... Easy to say, I am managing even Mambo based sites, running rock solid and doing the job they have built for, so this might be out of question. Bud don't despair, You can do it! You must hack here and there...

Did you already seen that since the advent of Joomla 1.6 the blog view has been changed? Let me refresh your memory! In Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 the Leading Articles - the articles on the top of Blog view - where shown on full by default, and for the rest of articles only the Article Intro part was shown. With Joomla 1.6 this has been changed, for all articles in a Blog view is shown only the introtext. You didn't even noticed that, right? Me either, until one of my clients has specifically requested the feature.

Have you ever seen this error message? Yea, correct it's seen in Media Manager when you try to upload files of certain types, as a MP3 file to use with your brand new MP# player module, or an Excel sheet to share whit your visitors.

Embarrassing. Let's get rid if it!

Just happens, that after you publish new content, this shows up on your Joomla 1.0 page with weird characters. (The problem was solved for Joomla 1.5+.) The causes, and the cures for it may be many, but sometimes a simple hack can solve your problems.