This blog is about Joomla, Web Development and everything about the Web that amuses me.

I copy here this nice table published by Brian Teeman on his blog:

This lists the permissions of the Joomla user groups, separated in frontend and backend.

From Wikipedia:

SQL injection is a technique that exploits a security vulnerability occurring in the database layer of an application

Here’s a link to a great reference against SQL Injection attacks: how to recognize the flaws and fight them!

On April 4th-5th 2008 there’s been a Joomla Day in Utrecht, Nederlands.

Here are two great presentations, published on the Arno Zijlstra blog.

The first, made by Mitch Pirtle (one of the Joomla founders) is a 10 minutes talk about the Web site branding. At the end of the presentation, Mitch tells us about how templates should be improved by the site designer to improve the branding of a website.

The second, made by Arno Zijlstra (a Joomla founder), talks about Joomla 1.5 template design.

He talks a lot about template overrides, Module Chrome, used to modify components and modules output.
Arno talks about menu management and uses JMenuSite to change template depending on the active menu.

Joomla has a great template system that let you change the website look and feel in a snap.

Sometimes you can change how certain elements of the template look like, by setting its parameters in the administrator interface.

Before the 1.5 release, the way these parameters were used was not consistent across different templates, as it didn’t exist a common architecture and each template vendor had to find a way to do that.

Reinventing the wheel is not a nice and smart way to do things, so Joomla 1.5 introduced template parameters. Also used for extension development, these parameters are a great improvement regarding template development.

Let’s try to open the template manager, and select the template RHUK Milkyway. On the right, you can see the “Parameters” box.

As you can see, we have 3 parameters: the first defines the dominant color on the page, the second sets the background color and the third decides the page width.

The template parameters creating is up to the designer, that must declare them in the templateDetails.xml file, add a line to params.ini and manage this value in the PHP code of the template.

There’s a great guide on how to manage template parameters on the Joomla Documentation Wiki, called Tutorial: Template Parameters.

That’s an invaluable piece of documentation that every template developer should print and keep on his desk

After the security hole that lead to the release of Joomla! 1.5.6, the Joomla Core Team decided that it was time to create a group of people devoted to the security of the CMS.

As Anthony Ferrara told us yesterday on the Core Team Blog, this squad will be called JSST (Joomla Security *** Team). More details will be uncovered during this week, so stay tuned