Joomlashack Blog and Updates

Our JomSocial 1.6 templates are ready

: Written by Tom Elliott Tom Elliott; Published: 28 January 2010 28 January 2010

Our friends over at JomSocial have been working furiously on a major new release. And now it's here and ready for your free trial!

JOMSOCIAL USERS: Joomlashack has two templates ready for the new JomSocial 1.6. Check out our JS Community and JS AppBox templates, on sale now!

JomSocial 1.6 has a slew of new features and improvements, including:

Amazon S3 Storage support
Massively enhanced privacy support
Improved activity stream
New API for new possibilities
Modules everywhere
And tons of refinement and bug fixes

Did you know JomSocial offers a one month free trial for just $1?

Learn all about JomSocial and its many improvements with version 1.6.

AppBox: A Fast Joomla Template Full of Tools

: Written by Tom Elliott Tom Elliott; Published: 28 January 2010 28 January 2010

What is JS AppBox? A killer SEO, fast-loading template ready and waiting to style some of the best extensions available in the Joomlaverse.

AppBox is a native Joomla 1.5 template built to visually integrate Joomla and three of its best extensions: K2, Kunena Forum, and the must-have JomSocial.

Not yet familar with K2? K2 is the powerful content component that gives you enormous flexibility to place and display your content differently than your typical "out of the box" Joomla layout style. Learn more about K2 and AppBox.

JS AppBox is a web 2.0 template optimized with raw SEO power and easy style integration with best-of-breed tools to make your site engaging and sticky.

Check out these many features:

Congresssional Joomla Web Defacements

: Written by Tom Cannan Tom Cannan; Published: 28 January 2010 28 January 2010

"Congressional Web Site Defacements Follow the State of the Union"
- Praetorian Prefect

An interesting problem that we as the US have is our denial of Cyberwar. While this post isn't exactly about that, it's close. Last Wednesday night during or after the President's State of the Union Address, several congressional websites were hacked by Red Eye Crew. Why is this of interest? According to Praetorian Prefect, they were all running Joomla!

How To Send Email from Your Joomla Extension

: Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge; Published: 26 January 2010 26 January 2010

Because of it ubiquitous nature, automatic emailing is something that many clients expect. People want to be notified immediately of changes on their sites -- when a new article has been submitted, or a blog comment has been posted. Joomla! already provides some of this functionality out of the box by notifying administrators when a user has registered on their site. You, however, may find yourself needing to implement emailing in your own components. As you may have already guessed, Joomla! provides a very helpful class for this: JMail.

Shack Pack for Schools makes school websites easier

: Written by Tom Elliott Tom Elliott; Published: 24 January 2010 24 January 2010

School Websites are challenging. Why not let the Shack Pack for Schools make it easier?

Back in 2007 Joomlashack released its first Shack Pack for Schools, built for Joomla 1.0.x and sporting our free Education template.

Now we're back with a new Joomla 1.5 version completely rebuilt to work with our Inspirion template, and stuffed with several outstanding extensions!

School Website Admins: the Shack Pack for Schools saves you many hours of research, fiddling, and Joomla configuring.

Our team of Joomla experts (some of whom are former high school teachers and administrators) have put together all of the tools and content you need to get started- all in one instant install package!

What's included in the Shack Pack?

Instant Joomla installer to create the full example site with content, several free and useful extensions, and relevant content. You'll start with a site that looks exactly like our "Shack Pack for Schools" demo.
Our Inspirion template, a $47 value with seven color packs included!
Access to our forum for Educators using Joomla where your questions can be answered

For just $97, you'll get a complete school website ready for your immediate tweaking and configuration.

How to Create Select Lists in Joomla!

: Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge; Published: 14 January 2010 14 January 2010

If you've worked with any kind of database-driven web application, you know that HTML forms are the foundation of the user's interaction with the database. Applications use forms to take input from the user and store it or use it to manipulate existing data. Unfortunately, HTML forms can potentially be quite tedious to write. In this article, we will look at a handful of helpful functions that Joomla! provides to save you time preparing your forms.

Automatically Update All Your Social Networks From Joomla

: Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge; Published: 13 January 2010 13 January 2010

Would you like to be able to update your Joomla site and automatically send that update to X / Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Ning and dozens of other sites?

This tutorial will show you how.

Our first part will be to create an RSS feed to export all our new posts. From there we'll use X / Twitterfeed.com and Ping.fm to distribute the posts to all our social networks.

Creating an RSS Feed

First we'll use Ninja RSS Syndicator to create our RSS feed. (it has the unusual name because it's developed by a company based in Japan).

Step 1: Go to Joomla.org and download Ninja RSS.
Step 2: Download Ninja RSS onto your desktop, and you'll see a file called ninjarss_unzipme.zip. Extract that package and you should see a new folder with a component and module inside.
Step 3: Go to Administrator >> Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload com_ninjarss.zip.
Step 4: Go to Components >> Ninja RSS Syndicator >> Feeds and click "New".
Step 5: If you want to produce a feed of your whole site, simply enter a title and click save. Otherwise, scroll down and fill in the information requested. Most importantly, you can choose to hide certain sections, categories or articles:
Step 6: Save the feed, and you should see a screen like this:
Step 7: Copy the entry in "Feed URL" and save it into a text editor. This will be the feed that is sent to X / Twitter and Facebook.

Sending your Feed to X / Twitter and Facebook

Step 8: We're going to use a service called X / Twitterfeed to send our news automatically to both X / Twitter and Facebook. The first step is to visit X / Twitterfeed.com and register.
Step 9: Login to X / Twitterfeed and click "Create New Feed".
Step 10: You'll see a box like the one below. Enter the title, and then paste the RSS feed from Step 6:

Step 11: Click "test rss feed" to make sure everything is OK. If it is, click "Continue to Step 2".
Step 12: This next part allows you to send your feed to X / Twitter and Facebook amongst other options:
Step 13: X / Twitter and Facebook will allow you to authenticate your accounts and link them to X / Twitterfeed directly from this page. You can also add "UTM" tags which are designed for Google Analytics. They will show in your analytics results, so you can see how much traffic has been sent from X / Twitter or Facebook. (Click here for instructions on using Google Analytics with Joomla).
Step 14: The final step is a really powerful feature here that many people overlook ... Ping.fm. If you create an account and authenticate it here with X / Twitterfeed, you can then pass on your updates to Linkedin.com, MySpace.com, Ning.com and dozens of others. There is a full list available here.

How's Your Patch Level? Establishing a Plan to Patch

: Written by Tom Cannan Tom Cannan; Published: 13 January 2010 13 January 2010

Happy New Year - How's your patches?

It's about the middle of January of 2010 and in the news, Google was hacked by unknown's from China and Google is considering a few options, including a complete pull out of China. A large search engine in China (not Google) was defaced by the Iranian cyber thugs, Adobe was appartently targeted in the same attack as Google. And in other news the new BREECH report came out from the ITRC showing that overall while breeches were lower than the year before, the number of exposed records was higher. And as I write this article, this just came across my desk:

"Hackers have stolen the login credentials for more than 8,300 customers of New York's Suffolk County National Bank after breaching its security and accessing a server that hosted its online banking system. "
source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/12/bank_server_breached/

What does this have to do with your Joomla site? Everything. Today I am discussing patching and patch management with you. For the purpose of this article I am going to refer to my personal favorite work on patching from ProjectQuant - Measuring and Optimizing Patch Management: an Open Model. A must read in my opinion.

Our SEO Community template better with Kunena

: Written by Tom Elliott Tom Elliott; Published: 12 January 2010 12 January 2010

How do you make a SEO monster template built to work with the best Joomla community extension (JomSocial) even better? How do you set up SEO optimized Websites? Do you want to learn SEO? Would be interested in SEO lessons? SEO Courses? SEO video tutorials? SEO Training? Conversion optimization lessons? Conversion optimization courses. Conversion optimization video tutorials. Conversion optimization training.

Make it work with the outstanding forum extension, Kunena!

JS Community is a powerful, flexible, lean mean SEO machine. And now you can integrate two outstanding tools into your site- JomSocial and Kunena.

Unfamiliar with Kunena? It's an open source forum extension used on over 100,000 Joomla sites the world over. Check out our JS Community Kunena Demo to see it in action.

Online Joomla Training at Joomlashack University

: Written by Tom Elliott Tom Elliott; Published: 12 January 2010 12 January 2010

Ready to grow your Joomla business in 2012? Join our Joomla Training class at Joomlashack University, the premiere online Joomla learning center, and let us show you how! You'll enjoy our comprehensive array of learning content including Joomla lessons, Joomla tutorials, Joomla video tutorials, and full Joomla courses.

In October we launched as a "Joomla for Beginners" Joomla Training course, but with plans to become so much more. The incredible response (over 400 students in under 80 days) provided us with excellent feedback about ShackU and where we should take it.

What do our students want next? More learning! More Joomla lessons, more Joomla videos and Joomla tutorials, more information about how to grow their Joomla business in 2010. We've already doubled our Joomla training content in just 3 months!

Now we are pleased to launch our latest course, Intermediate Joomla Training, included as a part of your ShackU membership!