I Blog about Web Design, Internet, CMS, Joomla, Wordpress, PHP, CSS and other Web-related topics.

A couple of days ago UpStartBlogger started a great giveaway: the winner will get a nice website, and that includes a 5-letters domain name and hosting!

The site we’re talking about is a WordPress showcase site, it’s already generating revenue (not a lot I think, if they give it away for free), and it could be a nice prize to win

How to win it? Just write a post about it, like I’m doing now!

The standard WordPress installation has a problem I consider a big security threat: by default, anyone can have a list of all the plugins (and see their version) installed in the system.

I fixed this problem on my blog a few months ago when I discovered it, but 2 days ago I saw a page talking about this and I tried this Google query.. it’s incredible to see how many blogs on the Web suffer this issue.

The solution to this problem is rather simple: all you have to do to stop showing the world how to hack your site is putting an empty file called index.html in the wp-content/plugins directory.

Looking at the SERPs, It’s not a surprise to see blogs such as FreeRangeLibrarian or Speed of Creativity, because they’re not technical blog.. but it’s a BIG SURPRISE to see the Blog Herald listed in the first positions..

For those who don’t know it, Blog Herald is a big network blog that publishes posts from many important bloggers, such as Chris Garrett and Lorelle Van Fossen.

I thought about this a lot, and I concluded that listing the version of the plugins installed on your system is a good idea and it improves security, don’t you think? Otherwise, why a blog such as that, that talks about blogging, security and so on all day.. would make life easier for hackers?

(Irony, of course)

Premium templates

Nu by YOOtheme

Catalyst, by RocketTheme

EnviraPraise

Sulky

Sunweb

MP Shopix

Free templates

AnotherVista15 by JoomlaMarket

Check out these nice free WordPress themes I found on the web this week:

Trippygreen

Fire Techno

Green and Brown

Watermelon

Statement

Peacemaker

WhiteDust

Green Skin Care

Amazing Life

Grayband

Poppin Retro

Graphicless

Tourist Journal

Play Soccer

3D Computer

Beauty Blog

Pronews

Greenzine

Choice

Load Music

Red Earth

A few great resources about blogging and writing on the web I found this week:

• 3 Simple Yet Effective Ways To Create Ebooks Quickly
• Spice Up Your Blog: Guest Bloggers
  
• Writing Content For SEO - It’s Not Rocket Science
  
• Drawing More Readers with Inspiring Aspirations
• Giving Credit To Proper Sources When Credit Is Due
  
• Blogging Challenge: Who Are You Actually Blogging For?
• How Do I Grow My Blog?
• Speed Posting - the Aftermath of Answering 19 Twitter Questions in a Weekend
• Darren Rowse’s Speed Posting: Great Reader Interaction or Lazy Content Pushing?
• A Secret to Blogging Success - Build Upon What You Build
• When Bloggers Return for More Blogging
• 16 Post Ideas for Your Blog - Different Types of Posts for Network Blogs
• How to Take a Break from Your Blog
• Improve Bounce Rate By Optimizing 404 Pages
• The Role of “Method Writing” In Blogging?
• What You Say is What You Are - The Problem of Blogger Inferiority Complex
• A Remedy for Blogger Inferiority Complex
• Why you should add Gravatars to your Blog
• Ten Simple Tips for Successful Blogging
• Reflections On Blogging As a Career Or As a Vehicle
• Google Page Rank Updating…. But….
• 5 Tips For Success When Traveling With Your Business
• Rethinking Blog Comments: Much More Than Just A Quick Way to Get Web Traffic
• Using Twitter To Build and Engage Your Audience
• How to Explain Web Working to the Uninitiated

The top news this week is the public release of the Mollom API, made available yesterday. Now it’s possibile to build applications using the Mollom’s filtering capabilities!

From Acquia, Drupal’s search compared to Google and Yahoo! and a nice video that talks about the new theming features of Drupal 6, Drupal 6: Hot new themes

A nice news about the Simple Machines Forum bridge for Drupal, that was announced last week as discontinued. The SMF management has granted permission to the module developers to continue their good job.

On MyDrupal.com you can find a great post that summarizes a few great free books and whitepapers for Drupal. Nice, I found many interesting thinks there!

After that the Garland theme got a redesign on 27th of April, on Lullabot Nate Haug wrote a nice post titled Theming Best Practices (Garland Gets a Cleanup) that talks about the best practices in writing a Drupal theme.

A few nice videos:

• New i18n and l10n features in Drupal 6 Part 1
• New i18n and l10n features in Drupal 6 Part 2
• Installing IMCE Image uploader in Drupal 6
• Installing FCK editor in Drupal 6
• Upload a favicon to your Drupal site
• Applying Patches to Drupal Core
• Drupal 6 Views Introduction

Here’s a selection of the latest modules made available:

• Feed Path Publisher allows site admins to publish multiple RSS feeds in the document’s tag, used by modern browsers to populate the RSS icon in their URL or location bar.
• DiaporamaDiaporama module allows you to manage images on flash slideshow, created with dewslider player version 5.
• ipAuthenticator - authenticates an IP to a role allows an administrator to assign an IP or a range of IPs to any role. This is useful for Intranets or developing your site locally.
• TrailScout, an intuitive breadcrumb system for Drupal
• STORM is a project management application for Drupal.

Today 1st of May is the RSS Awareness Day, the day devoted to spread the word about RSS (and Atom) feeds.

FeedBurner, the giant in the RSS world has recently told that they manage 60 millions of readers, a small percentage, 5.4% of the internet users.. a SMALL percentage!

Let’s spread the word about this useful technology!

Here are 2 useful links

• http://rssday.org/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

A few news in the WordPress world: first of all, WordPress 2.5.1 was released, a security release that solves a few problems found in the WP security.

Matt Mullenweg has made 2 important announcements regarding WordPress.com:

• A new feature will be introduced in WordPress.com, a plugin that will display the related posts, searching them in your blog first, then on wordpress.com and then on the internet.
• A new theme for photoblogging, called Monotone, will be made available to all users.

Themeshaper shows how to Add Gravatars For The Post Author in WordPress, and How To Build WP-PageNavi Into Your WordPress Theme.

Talking about WordPress 2.6, What to Expect with WordPress 2.6, 30+ Things That Should Be Changed for WordPress 2.6, and 5 Things WordPress should not do in 2.6.

From BloggingTips, how to manage Static Pages in WordPress.

From Weblog Tools Collection, how to reset WP password manually. Talking about Weblog Tools Collection, they started a WordPress Plugin competition. Nice idea! (it’s not the first one they organize)

bbPress had a small update for security - related concerns.

From HackWordPress, How To: Using WordPress as a Static Site

Lorelle on WordPress published the post WordPress Security Prevention, Reactions, and Scares, a nice discussion about the security of WordPress, its perception, a comparison with other popular CMS (Joomla! and Drupal) security issues plus some basic info on securing your blog.

A few videos:

• Wordpress Tutorial - Customizing Header With Linked Images
• Wordpress Blogroll Categories
• WordPress Performance Optimization and Tuning with SteadyOffload

First, we have to say all the news, right?

Joomla! 1.5.3 was released, It’s a security release so I reccomend you upgrade your Joomla! installations.

A greater news is the release of VirtueMart 1.1.0 Stable: now VirtueMart runs also on Joomla! 1.5, so all those e-commerce sites that run on 1.0.x can finally upgrade their installs. Also, CVSimproved 0.8 was released, so that you can CSV import/export your shop products in a snap.

The JoomlaTools blog explains how to migrate to Joomla! 1.5 when you have an extension that doesn’t support ETL and so it can’t be transfered using the Migrator plugin.

By GoodWebPractices, how to use Lightbox to improve the image experience with Joomla!, using YOOeffects, an extension provided by the YOOtheme team.

A few nice videos:

Installing Joomla 1.5.3 on Cpanel

Recover your Joomla! Administrator password using phpMyAdmin

Installing XAMPP & Joomla! 1.5

New Extensions

• As I said before, VirtueMart 1.1.0 Stable
• Core Design Access Text plugin, An easy way to control display of text to just the site users that you want to have see it
• High Rated Content Items Display the highest rated content links on your website
• JXtended Logger, a Plugin that allows you to log when people use your Contact Us form
• JXtended Catalog is a super-powerful, web catalog system for Joomla! 1.5
• JXtended Finder, an advanced Joomla! search engine
• JXtended Tidy is a simple Joomla! 1.5 plugin that interfaces with the HTML Tidy PHP Extension to render exceptionally clean, correct, and well-formatted markup.
• JXtended Comments Comments is not one, but three fantastic features rolled into one package. Comments, Ratings and Social Bookmarking brings your site alive and allows your audience to interact with you and each other.
• TimedTemplates With this extension , you can change your templates automaticaly : any time in day , any day in year or any time you want .
• NinjaXplorer, a Joomla 1.5 Native fork of JoomlaXplorer. It is their intention to continue the development of JoomlaXplorer, updating the code and adding new features
• Include Code Listing This plugin allows you to include code listing from external files into your content items, with syntax highlighting and line numbers.
• Tracks Joomla Tracks is a management tool for racing type championships, like formula one, WRC, nascar, etc
• JoomSuite Bill - Flexible Payment System JoomSuite Bill - is a payment billing system that allows receiving money from users and making out official invoices.
• RokWoopra A simple Joomla! plugin to add Woopra analytics code to your site.
• Search Engine Keyword Highlighting This mambot adds automatic search word highlighting after web searches
• Simple Review, a free review component for Joomla and Mambo
• NinjaMonials Let Your Users Be Heard. NinjaMonials is designed to help you quickly and easily collect and display testimonials for your site
• Joomla-phpBB forum bridge component This component is compatible with Joomla 1.0.13, Joomla 1.5 and CB 1.1 already! phpBB 3 is not supported.
• SocialProfilr Got Social Networking Profile? Expose yourself! SocialProfilr displays icons for your Social Networks profiles in

Free Themes

JW Clean Pro

Info | Demo

• Tableless layout
• Fast
• Suckerfish menu
• Fixed width, fluid width, custom width
• Joomla 1.5.x compatible
• 15 module position
• Cutom font size
• tested with IE 6 , IE 7.0,Firefox 2,Opera 9.02

Premium Themes

MP Shopix

Screen Resolutions: 1024×768px or above
Compatibility: Joomla 1.5+, Photoshop CS+

Demo | Info

JCSS Hosting

Joomla 1.0+ compatible
Table-less 100% CSS layout
12 module placement positions (Fully Collapsible)
Collapsible 3 column structure
3 Different module styles
3 Different color schemes for modules
Valid XHTML and CSS markup

Demo | Info

Bookito

The template is designed in 3 columns black and green color. Bokito Template is a nice template for animals company but you can eazy replace the header images on image folder (header1.jpg, heder2.jpg, header3.jpg, header4.jpg, header5.jpg) and logo.png with your own and used for any type of organization.

Demo | Info

Eden Rock

# 100% tableless CSS
# Validates with XHTML
# Validates with CSS
# Joomla 1.5 compatible
# Joomla 1.0+ compatible
# SQL dump available
# 16 module positions
# 2 modules styles
# Light weight design - only 10kb of images
# Create your own color theme by picking just 1 color!
# PSDs included
# Fully collapsible module positions
# S5 Effects scripts power: S5 No-MooMenu, S5 Tab Show, S5 Box
# Lytebox enabled
# 3 Menu systems: No-MooMenu Drop Down, No-MooMenu Fading or Suckerfish
# Custom Frontpage Display design
# Custom page and column widths

Demo | Info