Easy Way to Improve The Security of Your Joomla Template

Joomla is a Content Management System that helps you to integrate the content and the modules to develop the most interactive and impressive web pages for your website. Joomla is an open source software application with an easy to use interface and high extensibility. Joomla is used vastly by many corporate portals and websites, government applications, online newspapers and magazines, small-scale business websites, and many other personal web pages. You can install and set up the Joomla application easily within a few clicks. Some of the core features of Joomla are detailed below:

• Powerful caching option facilitates a speedy page load.
• A handy help system is integrated within Joomla for assistance.
• Incorporating templates into your web site as a whole or for individual web pages is made easy.
• Structure independent menu hierarchies irrespective of the content structures.
• Organize you content in a better way.
• Manage users with the help of the nine user groups provided with various levels of permissions.
• Provision of many international language support and UTF-8 coding.

The template is one of the most important aspects of your Joomla website.

It is used on every pageload and affects the look, feel, layout, pageload time and nearly every other aspect of the website experience.

Not surprisingly then, the template is also a prime target for intruders who look to gain access to your webserver or deface your site with spam or graffiti.

To help prevent this, use the following tips to improve your Joomla security policies specifically for your website template.

Fix file permissions on your web server

Like any computer system, the files on your web server all have permissions that control who can access them.

For web servers, these permissions are broken down into three categories:

• Read privileges — who can read a file
• Write privileges — who can edit a file
• Execute privileges — who can execute system commands
• The safest permissions for the files on your web server — including the files in your template — is for the public to have read-only access. Changes to these files should only be possible by the owner (i.e. the apache root user) of the file.

While a system administrator can easily modify permissions, we recommend that you use the excellent Admin Tools extension to properly set file permissions right from the Joomla backend.

Lock down the main template file

For all Joomla templates, the index.php file is the main file that loads all of the assets like CSS and JavaScript, and mixes the site layout with the content from the database.

Since this file is heavily targeted by intruders, it can be helpful to strictly control the permissions such that even the owner (again, the Apache root user, for example) of the file can not make changes.

In fact, if you use the template editor in the Joomla backend, the index.php file is made read-only for everyone once the file is saved.

Again, we think using Admin Tools to do this makes the most sense.

Prevent file listing (HTACCESS)

Letting visitors know what files you have in your Joomla template folder is never a good idea.

You can check if your template currently displays these files by typing the name of your template folder into your browser (eg. domain.com/templates/) and seeing if you get a Forbidden warning.

If you see a list of your installed template folders, your site is not as safe as it could be.

To solve the problem, you’ll need to use FTP to edit the HTACCESS file in the root of your website so that is contains the following line:

Options -Indexes

Restrict template edit permissions

Joomla has a powerful template editor that allows users to modify all the components of the template, including the main index.php file.

Thus, anyone who gets backend access to your site can hack your template with ease.

In addition to having unique usernames and strong passwords, you can limit the impact of these types of intrusions by limiting which user groups are allowed to edit templates.

For example, we recommend that users in the Manager usergroup not be able to edit the template.

To configure this in the Joomla backend, select Templates from the Extensions menu.

In the Options at the top-right, locate the Permissions tab and disable the following items for Managers and other groups with backend access who do not need to edit the template:

• Edit
  
• Edit State
  
• Configure ACL & Options
  
• Configure Options Only

Review users regularly for Super User access

Between your website developers, temporary contractors, and the staff/clients who regularly access the backend of a Joomla site, it’s easy to collect unnecessary Super Users.

Regularly monitor the Super Users and Administrators in the backend User Manager to ensure that every user is needed.

Is you are unsure of someone’s status, check the Last Visit Date in the User Manager to see when the user last logged in.

Keep template up to date

Like most popular content management systems, there are thousands of templates available for Joomla. And it’s very likely that most Joomla websites use one one of these templates either directly or as a modified version.

However, the vast majority of Joomla templates do not use the Joomla update system to help alert you when template updates are released.

Thus, we recommend that template users subscribe to any notification system provided by the template vendor.

An alternative and more comprehensive solution is to monitor the relevant changelog page on the vendor’s website for each of the templates installed on your Joomla website(s).

For example, the changelog page for the Callisto template from RocketTheme shows 6 updates in 6 months.

There are a number of free ways to monitor changes to a changelog webpage including plugins for Chrome and Firefox, and the online tool Versionista.

RocketTheme also maintains an RSS feed of updates for their templates if an RSS reader is still part of your daily routine.

Only use templates from trusted vendors (never from Warez sites).

Like most popular software, Joomla templates can often be found on Warez sites.

Often, these templates are modified to contain malware and other dangerous scripts.

If you are serious about security, it is critical to always download templates from the vendor’s official website.

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SEO Tips fo Your Joomla Website

Joomla is one of the most popular free content management systems (CMS) in the world that allows you to easily create and manage a dynamic website. It has an intuitive management interface to control all the features and functionality this powerful CMS possesses. Furthermore, there are hundreds of free extensions written for Joomla that allows users to extend its functionality and customize it to their own objectives. Joomla Content Management System is supported by a large and friendly community where newbies could really rely on assistance from more experienced members. Joomla counted more than 30 million downloads in 2012 and is growing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making constant improvements on your website to gain better rankings in the search engine results page (SERP). SEO includes different kinds of techniques and strategies you could use to optimize your website in order to increase website traffic. Traffic from search engines, also known as organic, is valuable because visitors are actively looking for something you offer and tend to convert more often, whatever your goals may be.

Outranking your competitors can be a challenging work and that’s where search engine optimization kicks in. If you make it easy for Google and other search engines to read and understand your content, they can rank you higher in their search results. Before we explain in depth how to optimize your website to stand out, you need to know how search engines work.

If you own a Joomla website, this article is very useful for you to recommend some hot tips to optimize it. Using these tips not only improves SEO for your site but also brings the natural interaction or conversion rate. Here are 9 hot TIPS for Joomla SEO 2016 introduced.

Using a good Joomla hosting server for your website

Firstly, all you need is a fast reliable server because it will improve your site speed which is an important key to friendly with Google. SiteGround do a fantastic job of hosting Joomla websites as a recommendation. Remember that Google does not like the website which is not fast.

Keyword, Key-phrase, and Topic Research, choose the right keywords

Any optimization of content for SEO, the first thing we do is keyword research, whether you are doing SEO for Joomla or for any other website. What we will focus strictly on specific keywords is not necessary - you can and actually should use phrases and synonyms of your target keywords - because search engines will be able to extract the content out of the article much better. You can use hints from Google itself by looking at the suggestions at the bottom of a search page.
And one important thing that it's always difficult to find the right keywords to target. How can we suggest some relevant words which will recommend the keywords? Or how we find our good long tail keywords. It helps us to save lots of time. And it helps us bring plenty of great traffic.

Enable Search Engine Friendly URL

SEF component is highly recommended because of its powerful features which are typically significant offers SEO advantages over the core component. One of popular Joomla SEO plug-in is sh404SEF. Besides creating SEF URLs, it allows you to monitor which requests are generating 404 errors, such that you can ensure you any broken areas of your site are immediately fixed. These are especially useful after migrating a new website. You can also choose to redirect old URLs to the new URLs. In addition, Meta descriptions are also supported by sh404SEF, and it has great support for other popular Joomla components such as Kunena forum and others popular components.

Create Internal Links to pass Page Rank

Another easy to do aspect of Joomla SEO, which is many times overlooked is the practice to create internal links. Remember that at the very bottom of your page, you should have a listing of all the articles which you want to pass Page Rank to.

Improve your meta descriptions

Joomla SEO gets a huge positive effect if you implement careful title and meta description.
Also, remember to create a description for your site which is optimized for search engines. The Joomla SEO settings can be found here under System > Global Configuration > Site Meta Description and Site Meta Keywords. It also goes without saying, that your site Joomla Robots section should be set to Index, Follow so that search engines indexing can occur.

Specify the image dimensions

Image size is one of the important points of loading speed, it is also the reason why you need to reduce or make lighter your images because it's the way help you to optimize your site.
Lighter images:
A couple of online services to make our images lighter and keep the quality are:
• www.jpegmini.com - for JPG files
• www.tinypng.com - for PNG files

Use good names and ALT tags for your images

In addition, using good names and ALT tags for images that will make your site more friendly with SEO and highly ranked by Google or any Optimized tool.

Work friendly on mobile

If your site it mobile-friendly, it will be favored in search engine results to sites which are not mobile-friendly. By default means that if your site is not mobile-friendly, your site is getting a very strong negative ranking signal. So you should make sure you've made the necessary changes to make it responsive and mobile friendly.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

How to Password Protect Admin area in Joomla?

Joomla! is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla! the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you're not an advanced user. Many Web hosting services offer a single-click install, getting your new site up and running in just a few minutes.
Since Joomla is so easy to use, as a Web designer or developer, you can quickly build sites for your clients. Then, with a minimal amount of instruction, you can empower your clients to easily manage their own sites themselves.

Joomla is the most popular open source CMS currently available as evidenced by a vibrant and growing community of friendly users and talented developers. Joomla's roots go back to 2000 and, with over 200,000 community users and contributors, the future looks bright for the award-winning Joomla Project.

Many companies and organizations have requirements that go beyond what is available in the basic Joomla package. In those cases, Joomla's powerful application framework makes it easy for developers to create sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla into virtually unlimited directions.

Steps Involved

In this documentation, we can check how to enable password protected admin Joomla area

1) Login to Joomla admin panel.
2) Go to ‘Components’.
3) Click the option ‘Admin Tools’.
If you are not installed the Admin Tools, please use the following steps to install.

a) Download the stable version of Admin Tool to your system.
b) Go to Joomla admin panel >> Extensions >> Manage.
c) Browse the Admin Tool file under the section ‘Upload and Install Joomla extension’.
d) Click ‘Upload and Install’ button.

4) Find the icon ‘Password Protect Administrator’.
5) Enter the username and password.
6) Click the button ‘Password Protect’.

That is how we can enable password protected administrator in Joomla.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

How to Edit A Joomla 3 Template In Joomla Administration?

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS.

Joomla is one of the most popular free content management systems (CMS) in the world that allows you to easily create and manage a dynamic website. It has an intuitive management interface to control all the features and functionality this powerful CMS possesses.

Joomla's primary focus has been on usability and extensibility since its initial release in 2005. It is because of this that the project has been the recipient of numerous awards, including being a three-time recipient of the PACKT Open Source Content Management System Award.

Joomla is a completely free open source solution available to anyone and everyone with a desire to build dynamic and robust sites for a variety of purposes. Joomla has been utilized by some of the Web's most recognizable brands including Harvard, iHop, and MTV. It is capable of carrying out tasks ranging from corporate websites and blogs to social networks and e-commerce.

Joomla is backed by a large and active developer community. With thousands of unique and useful extensions and templates available, it is presently one of the largest single site building platforms available. It is this incredible community effort that makes Joomla a great choice for developers searching for a single platform with which they can receive active support from their peers.

It is important to think of Joomla not as a limited platform on which a specific type of site is built, but a robust set of tools that makes it possible to connect visitors to data in a variety of ways. Joomla's extensive set of integrated technologies empowers site managers and developers to innovate well beyond the bounds of a simple website.

Steps Involved in editing a Joomla Template in the Joomla administration. This is handy to make small changes to your template files from the Joomla administration without having to upload files from ftp.

Steps Involved

1. Log into your Joomla 3 administration.
2. Click Extensions and then click Template Manager.
3. In the menu on the left click Templates.
4. From the list of templates select the template you want to edit, and then click the Template Details and Files link.
5. Select the file you want to edit from the list of template files and folders shown on the left.
6. Edit the file as required and then save and close the file.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

Easy Way To Speed Up Your Joomla Performance

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to activity that attempts to improve search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for words and phrases relevant to what the site is offering. In many respects it's simply quality control for websites. Having said that, if there was ever an industry that was little understood by outsiders it's SEO.

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS. Joomla! is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla! the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Speed Up Your Joomla Performance

Want to increase the speed of your Joomla website? just start with a speed test. Speed is the most important factor directly influencing the performance of a website. Tools like Pingdom and PageSpeed Insight can test the speed of a website and give valuable suggestions to improve its performance. If the requested web page is taking too much time to load, user-friendly interface, high quality content, conversion rate optimization, and other techniques are not going to help you.

Update Joomla Core

To update Joomla to the newest version you can either click on “Update now!” notification which should show up on your dashboard, or you can manually update by navigating to “Components” → “Joomla! Update.” Remember to back up your website, especially on major release updates.

Update Joomla Extensions

To update your Joomla extensions navigate to “Extensions” → “Manage” → “Update.”

Content Delivery Network

Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with Joomla is an easy way to instantly see decreased load times. By doing this, you will ensure you are serving your assets (product images, javascript, CSS) from multiple locations around the globe so they are delivered faster to your visitors.

Caching

Joomla has an inbuilt caching system. This cache is provided to improve Joomla website performance. Whenever a user request a web page, Joomla has to perform some necessary actions to respond. Joomla has to retrieve images, text, videos and other content from the database. There are plugins, templates and other files associated with the requested web page. These all need to be loaded before the server could send the response. This ultimately results in increased page load time. However, when the cache is enabled, these actions are performed when a web page is loaded first time. Content and all necessary files are stored in the Joomla cache. Now, for all following requests, no data will be fetched from the database.

Image Optimization

As we mentioned in a previous post on lossless image compression, on average 56 percent of a website’s page weight is made up of images. So optimizing images can drastically decrease your page load times. Unfortunately in Joomla there is no built-in option for image compression. So we recommend either compressing and resizing them beforehand in a tool like PhotoShop (using the “Save for Web” feature) or an online tool.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

What's New In Joomla 3.4.8?

Joomla has just released version 3.4.8 of its open-source content management system (CMS) in an effort to lock down two new vulnerabilities, one of which could grant attackers full control of an affected website. As noted by SecurityWeek, the severity of these flaws didn’t go unnoticed: Symantec tracked an average of 16,000 hits per day attempting to exploit the issue. Here’s a rundown of what’s at risk with an unpatched Joomla install.

Joomla 3.4.8 fixes some issues found in the 3.4.7 release on Monday to do with browser sessions. All reported bugs from the 3.4.7 update have been fixed in this release:

• Users were unable to edit or create items after the 3.4.7 update
• Fatal error about connection->stat() not existing on external database connections
• After session timeout users could still navigate the backend but without being able to create/edit items or use pagination/filters

Joomla Security Risks

For almost a decade, a critical remote command execution vulnerability has existed in Joomla; versions 1.5 through 3.4.5 are affected by CVE-2015-8562. According to Ars Technica, while Joomla security teams patched the vulnerability within two days, the bug was already being exploited in the wild on IP addresses 146.0.72.83, 74.3.170.33 and 194.28.174.106. In addition, any events using either “JDatabaseDriverMysqli” or “O:” in the user agent were likely attack vectors.

So what’s the big risk here? CVE-2015-8562 leverages an issue with poor filtering when Joomla saves browser session values. As detailed by Sucuri, exploiting this flaw and combining it with the result of MySQL meeting a UTF-8 character that isn’t supported by uft8_general_ci — which causes data truncation from a specific value — it’s possible to launch an attack that could fully compromise servers. Cybercriminals then use the servers as malware hosts or sell access to them for a fee on the Dark Web.

Big Numbers

Given the relative simplicity of the flaw and the substantial impact if exploited, its no wonder attackers were eager to jump on the problem in the wild. In an effort to determine which servers are still vulnerable, cybercriminals have been swinging for the fences, sending out HTTP requests and analyzing the responses of phpinfo() and eval(chr()) functions to find likely targets. The result? Symantec clocked a high point of more than 20,000 attempts in a single day, with day-to-day averages hovering around 16,000 hits, according to SecurityWeek.

It makes sense that cybercriminals would be working overtime trying to exploit the vulnerability. While WordPress still dominates the CMS marketplace, Joomla holds a solid second place with over 550,000 Web pages using the open-source service, including Linux.com, The Hill online newspaper and Harvard University. Full access to any of these servers would let malicious actors wreak havoc; Malware distribution, DDoS attacks and stolen data are all potential outcomes.

The takeaway here? Even with Joomla security on the ball, there’s no guarantee that existing code flaws won’t crop up and cause problems for big companies. The solution? Active monitoring for starters — just because an application, CMS or cloud-based service seems secure, that’s no reason to turn a blind eye if odd behaviors start to emerge. Immediate patching is also critical. Within two days, Joomla rolled out version 3.4.6 and closed the security hole but in the time hits were already skyrocketing. Two more days and 32,000 attacks could slip through. A week? More than 110,000.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is a programming language used to make web pages interactive. It runs on your visitor's computer and doesn't require constant downloads from your website. JavaScript is often used to create polls and quizzes. JavaScript support is built right into all the major web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Provided that the visitors to your site are using web browsers that support JavaScript (most do) and have JavaScript enabled (it is by default), then your JavaScript will run when they visit the page.

Module position basics

If you've been working with Joomla, you know that a Joomla template consists of HTML and some PHP snippets.

For one, it contains a component area where the output from the different components are shown (articles, blog lists, third-party components etc). A Joomla template also contains several PHP snippets, which are called module positions. You can assign modules to these positions and they will appear in the given position in your template.

Easier way to insert scripts

Of course, you can use an extension for each third-party script you want to enter. Probably there is one available (isn't there for almost anything?). The problem with this approach, though, is that you need to keep track of X number of extensions and their updates. And for each extension you add to your site, the chance of being hacked increases. After all, code is made by humans, and humans make mistakes.

For those reasons, I prefer using the 'Custom HTML' module when I need to insert code snippets. For best results, you should have special module positions for the JavaScript snippet modules. That way, you can control where in the source code the snippets appear, something which can be crucial for the workings of the snippet.

The method is simple, but effective.

You will need three module positions, and as many Custom HTML modules as you need (one for each snippet).

Inserting the module positions in your template

In order to make this as flexible as possible, you need three module positions:

• endhead
  
• topbody
  
• endbody
  

Now you're ready to insert the module positions. You will need to enter the following code into your template index.php file. You'll find it here: /templates/yourtemplatename/index.php.

Make sure to create a backup of your index.php file before messing with it.

Enter this just before the </head> tag.

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="endhead" />

Enter this just after the <body> tag:

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="topbody" />

Enter this just before the </body> tag:

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="endbody" />

Save your template.

The next step is to add the actual modules that will hold your JavaScript. But before that, we need to do some adjustments to the text editor settings.

Allowing JavaScript in your editor

To be able to add the JavaScript to the Custom HTML module, you need to allow Javascript in your text editor. If you use TinyMCE, you find this setting in Extensions -> Plugin Manager -> Editor - TinyMCE 2.0. Make sure you have the setting for 'Code Cleanup on Startup' set to 'Off' and the 'Code Cleanup on Save' to 'Never'.

If you're using JCE, go to Groups -> Default (or other group you're using) -> Editor Parameters. Make sure the 'Allow Javascript' setting is set to 'Yes'.

Adding the script to the Custom HTML module

Now, you need to add the actual Javascript snippet to a Custom HTML module and assign it to the appropriate module position.

I'll use Google Analytics as an example. Go to the Module Manager and click New. Choose the 'Custom HTML' module type. You will see the module parameters.

Enter a title for the module, for instance 'Google Analytics code', enable the module, choose not to show the module title.

For the Google Analytics code, we assign the module to the newly created 'endhead' position. This has the Google Analytics snippet appear just before the closing HEAD tag (</head>). As you have not entered the new module positions to the template XML file, they will not appear in the module position drop-down. Not to worry: You can simply enter the position name 'endhead' in the field directly.

Lastly, enter the HTML mode of your editor and paste the Google Analytics code into the window. You can now save the module.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

How to Customize Joomla CSS?

CSS

• CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
  
• CSS describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on screen, paper, or in other media
  
• CSS saves a lot of work. It can control the layout of multiple Web pages all at once
  
• External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files

CSS in Joomla Template

Some templates use only one CSS file (called template.css, mostly), others have several. For optimal page performance, you should keep the number of CSS files to a minimum. This reduces the number of server requests necessary to show the page. You may sometimes see that the template uses a main CSS file which imports all of the other files by the following syntax (example):

@import url('reset.css');
@import url('joomla.css');
@import url('typography.css');
@import url('modules.css');
@import url('custom.css');

Don't repeat styles if you don't need to

When styling elements with CSS it's important to be specific. And to keep your stylesheet lean. What I mean is you don't need to repeat styling just because you want to restyle an element. Let's say, for instance, that you have the following style for the H1 tag in your main CSS file (template.css or similar):

h1 {
font-size:24px;
color:#d7d7d7;
margin-bottom:1em;
text-transform:uppercase;
}

The normal styling for H tags are bold. Maybe you want to add the styling to make the header tag use the normal and not the bold style of the font. And, at the same time you don't want to have uppercase letters in the H1. Of course, you could do it like this, adding the following code to your custom.css:

h1 {
font-size:24px;
color:#d7d7d7;
margin-bottom:1em;
text-transform:none;
font-weight:normal;
}

This works, but it's not good code. You repeat all of the styling even though you just want to alter one style and add another. This is a better way:

h1 {
text-transform:none;
font-weight:normal;
}

In this case, you only add the styles that are different from the original. The other styles are left untouched.

Use Firebug to Test Your CSS

One of the tools I use to test my CSS is called Firebug. It's an add-on to Chrome which gives you a lot of information about the CSS and HTML structure of a web page. When you have Firebug installed, you can right-click on an element and choose 'Inspect element'. The Firebug window will open at the bottom of the screen. Now, you can see the HTML structure (left) and the CSS (right).

Now the fun begins! You can start experimenting with the CSS directly in Firebug. Want to change the margin of an element? The background color? Remove the border? Every tweak you would like is available to play with, and the result is instantly shown in the browser. Of course, if you refresh the page the changes are lost. When you're happy with your changes, copy the CSS into your custom CSS file and upload to your server.

You can also use the Inspector or Firebug Lite in Google Chrome or Safari.

Take a look at my previous post about 8 Free Firefox extensions every Joomla user should have.

Take some time to learn CSS

I believe every Joomla user / web site developer should learn some CSS and know HTML by heart. It makes it so much easier to modify your templates and to achieve what you (and your client?) wants.

It's not like learning PHP. I hardly know more than a handful things about PHP. HTML and CSS, however, are like second nature to me. That's because I've invested time into learning and practicing the use of these skills. This is especially true for CSS.

Easy to get started with CSS and Joomla

The easiest way of starting to learn CSS is to look at your existing template.css. Look at the structure of it and try changing some of the styles. Do a backup of the file first.

You could try and change the header tags first. Want the H2 tag to be smaller? You got it :) And now it's a site-wide change, valid for all instances of the H2 tag. Other tags to change are the a (link) tag, the p (for instance adjusting the line spacing) and the UL and LI tags (bullet list).

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ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

Brute-force attacks on Joomla sites are common these days. The reality website owners must face is that hackers are in control of large farms of hacked computers. These computers can be used to coordinate massive brute-force attacks on a website.

As a website owner, in fact I'm hosting several sites, I'm constantly getting these types of attacks on my servers. In this post, I look at a few ways to reduce the chance that someone gains unlawful access to your Joomla websites by way of brute-force attacks.

So, what is a brute-force attack?

Let’s see what Wikipedia says:

In cryptography, a brute-force attack, or exhaustive key search, is a cryptanalytic attack that can, in theory, be used against any encrypted data (except for data encrypted in an information-theoretically secure manner). Such an attack might be used when it is not possible to take advantage of other weaknesses in an encryption system (if any exist) that would make the task easier. It consists of systematically checking all possible keys or passwords until the correct one is found. In the worst case, this would involve traversing the entire search space. When password guessing, this method is very fast when used to check all short passwords, but for longer passwords other methods such as the dictionary attack are used because of the time a brute-force search takes.

In short, a brute-force attack is trying to force itself into your website administrator by trying every combination of username and password it can come up with.

There are two main problems with this for you as a website owner. Obviously, it’s not good having people snoop around in your Joomla admin with super administrator rights. That’s a given. The other thing to be concerned a about is the fact that such attacks take away a lot of capacity from your server.
How to protect yourself from brute-force attacks

There are several things you can do to make things harder for those trying brute-force attacks. Longer and more complex usernames passwords is one, blocking access to the site is another.

Strong usernames and passwords

You’ve heard it time and time again: Make sure you have strong passwords! Usernames are important, too.

I have made it a habit to never use ’admin’ or ’administrator’ or anything like it as usernames on my websites. I choose a unique username for each site.

When it comes to passwords, I always use 20 random alphanumeric characters or more, in a combination of lower and upper case, and with some symbols thrown in. And I never use a password for more than one website.

20 characters, you say? How on earth do you remember that?

Three words: Password Management Software.
Manage your passwords with ease

Personally, I use LastPass.com to both generate and manage my passwords. I’ve heard lots of good things about 1Password as well, so if you’re on a Mac you might wanna try that out.

Using these tools, there is no problem managing hundreds, or thousands of passwords with ease. Just make sure you have a solid master password, and you might consider investing in a Yubikey for a two-factor authentication with Joomla.
Blocking access to the site

Another method of avoiding the perils of brute-force attacks is to restrict access to the website or server based on the attackers IP or IP range. There are several ways to do this:

    Using a Joomla extension
    Using .htaccess blocking
    Blocking the IPs in your firewall

Joomla extension

I recommend AdminExcile as an excellent plugin for Joomla 2.5 or later. It lets you block IPs after a certain amount of failed password attempts, and you can set how long the block will be in effect for. This has proven very effective for me, as I’ve avoided some very nasty attacks.

I recently had an attack on a website where over 4000 machines tried to brute-force their way into a Joomla site. It didn’t succeed, and we managed to block the IPs permanently rather quickly. Another day, I had 25000 brute-force attempts on another website. That’s when I adjusted the AdminExcile plugin to block the perpetrators after fewer attempts and for a longer period of time. That definitely helped.

The main reason the attack didn’t succeed was strong passwords. AdminExcile, however, can prevent your site from going down by blocking the IPs after X failed attempts.
Using .htaccess blocking

On Apache servers, you can add IP addresses to your .htaccess file. This will prevent those IP addresses from even reaching your Joomla administrator page or any other page on your website.

Here’s a tool that makes it easy to create the snippets you need for your .htaccess file:

http://www.htaccesstools.com/block-ips/

Example code:

    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny from 199.442.33.32

Read more about using .htaccess to block visitors with various methods.
Blocking the IPs in your firewall

If you’re on a dedicated server or your own network, blocking IP ranges on the firewall might be a good option. Be advised, though, that this may block some valid traffic to your site. For some sites, this won’t be a problem. If I have a local site that has no clients from outside my country, I can block IP addresses from a whole country if I so wish. It won’t affect my business. If you’re business is international, you need to consider this more carefully and pinpoint specific IP addresses or limited ranges.
Conclusion

To conclude, brute-force attacks is probably something we need to live with. There are, however, quite a few things you can do to limit the chance of someone succeeding with such an attack. The first thing you should do is increase the complexity of your admin passwords.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.

What's New in Joomla 3.4.4?

What's Joomla?

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS. Joomla is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and software design patterns, stores data in a MySQL, MS SQL, or PostgreSQL database, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, search, and support for language internationalization.

Jommal provides an online collaborative community manual for Joomla! users, developers or anyone interested in learning more about Joomla! Currently, they have over 4000 articles written and maintained by Joomla! community members.

New in Joomla 3.4.4

• Further en-GB language cleanup
  
• Fixes for MSSQL and PostgresSQL Joomla installations
  
• jQuery, HTML5Shiv and CodeMirror updates
  
• Finished implementing the Joomla codestyle rules

Joomla can be used for

• Specialist websites
  
• Simple websites
  
• Custom applications
  
• Many design options

The benefits of having a Joomla website:

• Website is easy to update
  
• Website can be updated from anywhere with an internet connection
  
• Multiple people can access the administration site at the same time
  
• Design changes are easy to implement
  
• There is no need to pay a specialist to do the updates
  
• You control when you want to do the updates

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.