Joomla Views

Winners of the Azrul JomComment/MyBlog Contest are:

@briantjones

@lifepraise

@ashdodia

@joomladesigner

@perrywirth

The five lucky winners get their pick of a JomComment or MyBlog license, courtesy of our friends at Azrul.com.  Congratulations!

To claim: Please tweet "I won the @joomlaviews Azrul contest and I want my free (JomComment or MyBlog) license!" on your twitter account to verify your claim!

Thanks everyone for your participation - we look forward to adding more contests like this in the future!

The Joomla Views Team

We have wanted to run a contest for a while now so we contacted our friends at Azrul.com to see if they were interested in sponsoring a twitter viral contest.

They said they'd be happy to participate!

So here is the deal.  We are going to giveaway five licenses of JomComment or MyBlog on June 7th; each of the five winners get to pick their choice of the professional license versions.

Want to win one?  Here's all you have to do.

1) Follow @joomlaviews on twitter and,

2) Simply tweet "Just entered to win a JomComment/MyBlog license from Azrul.com.  Just follow @joomlaviews and retweet http://cli.gs/aXMaRr"

That is it - that's all you need to do, and you too can win a license from Azrul.com.

This contest is open to people anywhere in the world and is free to enter.  Contest winners will be announced on Sunday June 7th, 2009.

If we go past 2000 followers by June 7th, we will also give away a JomSocial Professional license.  So the more that enter the contest, the better the prizes.

Good Luck!

Click here to find out more about Azrul.com and their products

It is now over Three weeks since Joomla 1.5.10 was released as a 'strongly encouraged' security update by the Joomla security team.

Many users rely on using Fantastico from Netenberg.com to update their installations; this is a huge mistake, especially for security updates that should be applied as soon as possible.

Why?  Well, it has been three weeks and the guys at Netenberg.com has not released a new update to their flashship Fantastico to include the latest version of Joomla.  To leave your Joomla installation un-secure for that long is risky and down right dumb.

The Netenberg.com team really used to be on the ball, quickly releasing product updates as soon as there were updates to their one-click install list of web ware which includes Joomla, WordPress,  Drupal and a multitude of other popular CMS, blogging softwares and Customer support software.

However, as of lately (the last few months (at least)), their updates have been less and less frequent and not even security releases as the Joomla 1.5.10 or WordPress' 2.7.1 made them release a quick update; but rather they appear to take their sweet time releasing several product updates together whenever they get around to it and that makes a lot of web sites un-secure waiting for an update.

I would really not like to fault Netenberg for this as they have a long list of products to keep up to date (around 50 at current count) and there lies the problem. They have too many product updates to implement and not enough time, but the real problem is Fantastico is a commercial product and they have a responsibility to their clients to keep current versions available.

If your hosting account or web server uses Cpanel, you most likely have access to Fantastico in your control panel.

I use Fantastico frequently; it is so much quicker and convenient to one-click install a Joomla installation than manually creating a database, uploading Joomla and manually installing it but (and this is a BIG but), I do not rely on Fantastico to update my installations.

If I were to install a new Joomla installation today (April 19, 2009) using Fantastico, it would install Joomla 1.5.9 which is an un-secure version; so I would have to upload the 1.5.9 to 1.5.10 upgrade package from Joomla.org to make it seucure and that is still quicker and easier than the old manual way.

My point is... Three weeks after a security release, that extra step should not be necessary as Fantastico should already have implemented the security release by now.

Likewise, any of the installations that I have; whenever an update it available, I will manually install the new version right away, not relying on Fantastico.

You can always upgrade your Fantastico installed Joomla installation without causing any problems with either Fantastico or your Joomla installation (as always, always back up first).

So rule of thumb, use Fantatico to install your Joomla installation, but update manually whenever a new release is made from the Joomla security team.

 Stay safe, Stay secure - Keep your installations up to date.

Tony Lindskog
Editor-in-Chief

UPDATE: Netenberg released an update to Fantastico on April 21; the day after this blog was posted, that included amongst others Joomla 1.5.10.

We are proud to announce that we are now covering another great Joomla template club by adding IceTheme.com.

We have added six template announcements from IceTheme and we are really impressed by the quality of their templates and we will cover all their upcomming templates as well.

Check out the news releases below, we are sure that you will find at least one or two which you will really like. Guaranteed!

IT Newsy - A newspaper/magazine style template which comes in light and dark.

IT Motion - A template that gives you a mo

IT Tribune - Another great grid based newspaper/magazine style template.

IT  Bloggy - A template for the blogging community.

IT Breeze - A premium, clean white spaced theme.

IT Habitat - IceTheme's first template for 2009, and this one comes with a custom Fireboard forum theme.

NinjaForge reports a potential security issue with ALL Joomla 1.5x up to and including 1.5.8; luckily they also report a fix for this security leak.

Apparently there is an issue with attachmentlibrary.php which will allow a folder parameter to be passed to it and have it register as a web server environment variable and this variable is not correctly sanitized.

This script is linked to the xstandard editor plugin, and it affects any and all editors. even third party WYSIWYG editors.

I do not know how serious this issue is and if you might be better off waiting for Joomla! to release 1.5.9.

For more information go to NinjaForge's Directory Travel security fix. 

UPDATE:

Joomla releases version 1.5.9 which supersedes the above fix - For more information go here. 

Phew...

I had a real long day working on iJoomla's most excellent component Newsportal today and getting our SEF urls back up again after yesterdays forced Newsportal upgrade.

My Server administrator  did some server work yesterday and this caused iJoomla Newsportal to absolutely just puke with the following error.

Good news is that this was a known issue at iJoomla and I was advised right away to just go ahead and download the latest Newsportal version (1.5.4) and I was back up and running again in no time.

The problem I found was that the Featured Categories did not give unique item id#s, but rather would use the same item id as the current page viewed which made it impossible to link to those Newsportal categories.

Long story short, the fix was to delete all three Newsportal menus (Sections/Categories/content) and uninstall iJoomla Newsportal and re-install it as this re-generates the Newsportal menus,  something which cannot unfortunately be done manually without re-installation at this time.

However, all of this is a cake walk, takes no time at all UNLESS you have duplicate named categories in Joomla and Azrul's MyBlog which of course, I did!

So many hours of head scratching later I finally figured this anomaly out, renamed the categories appropriately  and we are now back up and running with perfectly styled Search Engine Friendly URLs for iJoomla Newsportal via SEF Advanced 2008; two of Joomla CMSs finest components.

the end.

We want to wish everyone a Happy New Year and hope that you will have a great evening of festivities and that 2009 will bring you prosperity and good luck!

 We have received several interesting products which we will review for you in the next couple of days; I am currently checking out Stalytics2 from soft-evolution and it is not only pretty but it appears to be a great LIVE traffic tracking component.  More to come!

But for now... Enjoy the last day of 2008 and look forward to the new 2009, hopefully without too much of a hang over.

 Cheers,

The Joomla Views Team

The Team here at Joomla Views wants to wish the whole Joomla community a heartfelt Merry Christmas and we hope that Santa brings you all the presents that you wanted (fat chance, right!?).

 If you are looking for that last minute gift to someone or let's face it; yourself, check out our Merry Xmas Discount post where you can find great deals and discounts from great companies such as iJoomla, JoomlArt, Shape5, Pakt Publishing and many many more!

We are starting to get a larger following @ Twitter - check us out and please follow us as we head into 2009 with curiosity and excitement. 

 Again - Happy Holidays and thank you for visiting us.

The Joomla Views Team

We have decided to make it easier to follow us so besides adding this blog we have also gone Twitter on you.

 Check us out and follow us on Twitter for our latest news @ twitter.com/joomlaviews.

Hi and welcome to a new section of Joomla Views, our blog section.

 The Joomla Blog section will be the place where we post breaking news or updates before or instead of writing an article about something.

 Was there a new update to a particular extension, was there a new template released or did Joomla! release a security update that we feel should be announced right away?  Check our blog for those quick updates.

 We might also be interested in adding guest bloggers that could get their own blog to rant about some specific Joomla related topic, contact us if you are interested.

As you may also have read, today serves as the day we officially launch Joomla Views v2.0 that has been in the works over the last month or so; so now there will be more time for writing articles and news stories.

 Thank you for stopping by and please help bring us more traffic by spreading the word about Joomla Views.

Kind Regards,

Tony Lindskog
Editor-in-Chief
Joomla Views