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Remove "Generator" meta tag in Joomla

How to remove the "Generator" meta tag from a Joomla 1.5 Website

Any page that Joomla renders by default contains a meta-tag for "generator". This is to allow search engines and visitors to see what Content Management System (CMS) you are using. Although I am a "credit where credit is due" type of guy, I am also a security minded individual. I want any potential attackers and hackers to have as much trouble as possible, so I don't want them to know what CMS system I am using.

Here is what the Meta Tag Creates:

<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management" />

Here is how to remove the code completely from your site.

Open /libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer/head.php

Find the line -

  $strHtml .= $tab.'<meta name="generator" content="'.$document->getGenerator().'" />'.$lnEnd;

Delete this line

Refresh your page, check the source and the "generator" meta tag will be gone.

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Joomla - Alphatoolbar Exact Phrase Search

One website that we are building uses the alphatoolbar plugin. One problem that we had was that the Tag function would conduct a search of the site using the "any" searchword option. Obviously some keywords returned thousands of results while we were looking for "exact" matches, so that it functioned more like a tag system.

To change the behavior of the tag button, open alphatoolbar.php and around line 142 change :

From:

$tags .= "<li><a href=\"" . JRoute::_("index.php?option=com_search&searchword=$metakey&submit=Search&searchphrase=any&ordering=newest") . "\"

To:

$tags .= "<li><a href=\"" . JRoute::_("index.php?option=com_search&searchword=$metakey&submit=Search&searchphrase=exact&ordering=newest") . "\"

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Re-styling the Community Builder Registration Form with CSS

Over the last few weeks I have been dreading the redesign of the bankwide registration form. This task has met with a lot of frustration while researching how to "style" the community builder form for joomla. There isn't a lot of good information out there, so I decided to write one. As always this tutorial assumes that you have a basic grasp of HTML, CSS and can use Firebug in firefox.

First, start by creating your web form style, being lazy I used the web 2.0 form style generator. I then used firebug to determine the location of the css file governing the form fields. With your favorite editor open /components/com_comprofiler/plugin/templates/default.css (assuming you are using the default template)

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Remove 'Other Articles' Mini Front Page mod_minifronpage

Something that I have found annoying (at least from my perspective) is in the fantastic module - Mini Front Page (minifrontpage) is the automatic insertion of the default text "Other Articles". If I edit the module, this text is often re-inserted even after removal. So, I decided to remove it.

First - Open /SITE/modules/mod_minifrontpage/mod_minifrontpage.xml

Around line 137 you will find param name="header_title_links" type="text" default="Other Articles"

Simply remove the lines defining the parm /parm that contains "other articles" and POOF! the field is gone from the module.

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