The other day, I got an email from a reader about a problem with content in Joomla articles (more about that in another post). In the email, he mentioned he was using Joomla 1.5.20 (at the moment, 1.5.25 is the current version).

So, the first thing I told him was to upgrade his Joomla site to the latest version. At first, he hestitated. It's too hard! But after a few words of caution, he came around and changed his mind. And I think you should, too.

Before Christmas, I experienced the nightmare of all webmasters. A hard disk on one of my servers went bad and I was unable to mount it.

- Oh well, I thought, that's not a big problem. I have a nightly backup.

When I called the hosting company - I was confident I had a couple of hours worth of work ahead of me. Boy, was I in for a shock...

This is an important and urgent security advisory from CB Team: Upgrade all your Community Builder 1.0 and 1.1 installations to CB 1.2.1 as soon as possible.

They received a private report yesterday from a  Joomlapolitan about a critical vulnerability of CB 1.1, that they could now reproduce and confirm.

I have written a post earlier about why you should keep your Joomla sites updated for safety reasons.

Phil Taylor published this Tweet today:

A lot of people getting old versions of #joomla 1.5 hacked today - been fixing sites all day for customers...
UPGRADE NOW to #Joomla (latest version)

I couldn't say it better myself. It's crucial that you upgrade to the latest version of Joomla.

I recently found a very useful and time-saving extension for Virtuemart.

The "Latest Orders VM" module for the Joomla administrator back-end provides a quick way of accessing your Virtuemart orders, right from the control panel.

I have previously written several blog posts about Joomla and SEO.

The first one was Six steps to get your Joomla site indexed in Google. In the post, I talk about things you can do to make your Joomla site attractive in the most important search engine of them all.

A later post was the fourth in my series on Joomla meta tags which discussed how to check your Joomla meta tags in Google Webmaster Tools.

Both of the posts mention Google Webmaster Tools and how to use various functions of these useful tools.

I recently figured out, though, that many people have trouble understanding how to verify their Joomla website in Google Webmaster Tools.

By verifying your site with Google. you tell them that you are the owner of the website and that they may show details about the site to you. Without verifying your site you won't get access to a lot of the more advanced functions of Google Webmaster Tools.

Read on to get the full instructions on how to verify your Joomla site in Google Webmaster Tools.

As a SEO aware web developer, you should learn about canonical links and how to use them in Joomla.

Canonical links are tags you enter into your page to ensure that Google indexes the correct page, and to avoid duplicate entries in the Google index.

Remember to always use the hyphen character (-) in your aliases. That way, you'll get more value from your URL keywords. Google treats hyphen (-) like a space, while it treats underscore as a non-breaking space.

Every month, each of the major Joomla template clubs release a new template.

In this post, I take another look at the premium business Joomla templates released. This time for the month of November 2011. The post is a bit delayed, as we are already in December, but the templates are worth looking at nonetheless.

There are templates from Yootheme, RocketTheme, JoomlArt, Joomla Shack and Shape5 on display this month. Enjoy!

Every month, each of the major Joomla template clubs release a new template.

In this post, I take another look at the premium business Joomla templates released. This time for the month of October 2011.

There are templates from Yootheme, RocketTheme, Joomla bamboo and JoomlArt on display this month. Enjoy!