Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 31, 2013:
- The potential of Joomla 3.2
- JWC Scholarship Programme Announced
- How to Easily Simplify a RocketTheme Template
- The How to Joomla series
- How to use tags in Joomla 3
- 3 Joomla security tips to protect against brute force attacks
Written by Nick Antimisiaris
The Joomla! feature tracker is on fire and filled with awesome new features that might well tip the scale in the open source CMS market. In true Joomla - all together - spirit everyone has been contributing to make our CMS even better and friendlier for first-time, intermediate, advanced and expert users. As of yesterday, the joomlacode.org project area has 70 new features marked as ‘Ready for review’ or ‘Pending’.
There are some very high potential features that will surely change the way people see and use Joomla. The new features that are in the pipeline target many different perspectives as they address user interface improvements, missing enterprise functionality and new possibilities for third party extensions. The following is just a randomly ordered short list of what may be considered as major potential new features that may be included - if you help the process - in the next Joomla 3.2 release:
JWC Scholarship Programme Announced
Written by Radek Suski
Hundreds of remarkable community members will join the second Joomla! World Conference (JWC) that will be held on November 8-10, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts (USA). Unfortunately not everyone will be able to attend this great event. For some, the reason will be because of lack of time, for others it will be because of too high travel and accommodation costs. We are unfortunately not able to donate more time to individuals, but we would like to try to provide financial help to those people who cannot afford to attend this conference.
The Joomla! Leadership Team is happy to announce a limited Scholarship programme to enable individuals to attend, who would not have been able to afford to do so, without financial assistance. The Scholarship will not only benefit the recipient but also the wider Joomla! community. These scholarships cover the cost of conference admission and provide assistance with travel and lodging. We of course respect your privacy and so all applications are made in the strictest confidence. Applications can be filled by the interested person but also community members can fill the application nominating a candidate.
How to Easily Simplify a RocketTheme Template
Written by Ryan Pierson
We've received a lot of feedback from our community recently asking how various templates can be best modified to meet the needs of a variety of sites. From corporate enterprises to personal portfolios, our community is as diverse as it gets.
That's why we've designed all of our Gantry-powered templates and themes to be easily modified without any programming or website design experience required. In fact, there is very little you can't do with one of our templates after just a few minutes of working with the settings made available in the back end of Joomla or WordPress.
In the video embedded above, we used Corvus (our newest Joomla template) as an example of just how easy it is to modify from one end of the design spectrum to the other. In this six-minute video, we took Corvus from a demo state to a clean, content-ready template that is sure to appeal to any lover of modern minimalistic design.
Written by Anthony Olsen
I’m happy to announce a new blog series on the Joomlabamboo blog called How to Joomla.
At last month’s Melbourne Joomla User Group, we were discussing how to assign a Joomla template to a specific page and someone pointed out a setting that I had completely missed in the menu manager. I can’t count the number of times I’ve created a menu item in Joomla 3 but I have never seen the “Template Style” dropdown. This option obviously provides you with the ability to assign a specific Joomla template for a menu item, but I can honestly say I have never seen it.
So the How to Joomla series will be dedicated to fleshing out those little (and sometimes big) issues that new users and experienced users alike face when building Joomla sites.
Written by Anthony Olsen
One of the big new features implemented and introduced in Joomla 3.1 is Tags. The tags component allows you to create tags for your content (articles, contacts and weblinks by default) and use them throughout the website. Creating tags is easy and is very similar to creating other content items in Joomla backend. You just select Tags component from Components menu and click on the New button. Let us go through the process of adding new tag combined with screenshots of the process.
Start by signing in to the Joomla backend and clicking on Components main menu item in admin main menu. When submenu opens, click on Tags component menu item. As you can see from this screenshot, Tags component looks completely the same as, for example, Article manager, with fewer filter options on the left side of the screen.
3 Joomla security tips to protect against brute force attacks
Written by Ron van Schaik
There has been a lot of talk lately regarding Joomla Security and attacks on Joomla sites. Yesterday the website security company Sucuri posted a blog entitled "Big Increase in Distributed Brute Force Attacks Against Joomla Websites" in which they summarize some very worrying statistics:
"We have seen an average of 6,000 brute force attempts against Joomla sites daily across our honeypots and CloudProxy networks. Some days the attacks increased to almost 13k, and dipped as low as 3k attempts. However, for the last 3 days, you can see a big increase, reaching almost 269,976 scans yesterday, September 2nd, 2013. That’s a very big increase out of nowhere."
The following image shows the alarming increase in attacks over the past few weeks:
This got us thinking how such attacks could easily be thwarted. The attacks they cited were login attempts on the Joomla Administrator folders which are relatively easy to protect.
