Designs Edge Web Development - Designs Edge Web Development

Getting Started with Joomla 1.7

Tonight we begin our deployment of Joomla 1.7.  In case you are wondering what happened to Joomla 1.6, it was quickly supersceded by a security update that pushed it up to a new version level that happened at the same time as the scheduled release.  The main thing to note is that 1.7 is basically the same as 1.6 with security patches and some functionality added.  Tonight we begin the process of migrating a 40,000 + article and several hundred users currently in a Joomla 1.5 database into the new site.

First, let us say that there are several migration tools in the Joomla Extensions directory, some free, some commercial - some work, some don't - we don't want any risks with our data, so we tend to do manual Joomla migrations of our systems, and this will be no different. 

The installer is pretty much the same, once the files are on the server it walks users through a very thorough and well documented procedure to bring the site live. This is a bit beyond the scope of this article, we reccomend you read the Joomla BeginnersDocumentation.  Once you have completed all the steps, your site is live and ready to go.

For our purposes, we do not install the sample data.  It tends to create more problems later in database imports, menu options, etc.  If you are a beginner with Joomla, I reccomend that you go ahead and install the data, you can always remove it later.

The first thing that we are studying is the new ACL or Access Control Lists that were released with Joomla 1.7.  Quite frankly, this is one of the major upgrades we have been waiting for since the fork of Joomla 1.0 away from Mambo. The new ACL for Joomla 1.7 documentation is quite well laid out, but will take several hours to review, and will quite frankly probably take a couple of days to layout appropriately for our site.  I cannot stress the importance of laying out your ACL prior to going live - this is something that will save you a lot of headaches going forward.  This truly is an "ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" scenario.  Any system administrator that has inherited someone else's ACL's knows what I am talking about here.

Here are some of the major changes from Joomla 1.5 to 1.7 as related to users and groups:

We are off now to begin diagraming out our user access control list - don't worry, we will be back to walk you through the process step by step.

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.

1. Open /libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer/head.php
2. Find the line :

•  $strHtml .= $tab.''.$lnEnd;

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

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") . "\"

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

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)