List of top things to do to secure your Joomla website

By Jonathan Camp

Top things to do to secure your Joomla website

Updated: 3/2/2011 (you can now download and view this as a checklist document for your reference and guidance)

Here’s my list of the top things to do to make sure that your not leaving security vulnerabilities in your Joomla website and that it runs smoothly each and every day…

• FIRSTLY MAKE SURE YOU ARE RUNNING THE LATEST RELEASED VERSION OF JOOMLA. Login to your Joomla site and look at the version number. If you are not running the latest version, download it and update your site straight away! At the time of writing this (Feb 2011) there are two major versions of Joomla. 1.6 is the latest brand new release and version 1.5.xx. If your site is using a 1.5.xx version make sure you upgrade to the latest version in that range e.g. 1.5.xx to 1.5.xx – do not jump to version 1.6 without a lot of testing and looking at the implications of doing so!
• If your database tables in MQSQL for Joomla have ‘jos_’ as the prefix, read this first tip:
  Download EasySQL (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/hosting-a-servers/database-management/2867) and rename the database prefix of our databases within MySQL from the jos_ prefix (if everyone wants more feedback on how to do this leave me a comment and I’ll create a blog entry )
• Create a spreadsheet grid showing all your Joomla websites against modules / version installed in each site with dates and links to latest versions (this should be reviewed and signed off every month)

Joomla 1.5 – How to create templates

By Jonathan Camp

Creating a basic Joomla! template – Joomla! Documentation

Tutorial on how to create a basic Joomla template. This WIKI article goes through all aspects of creating a standard template for Joomla including how to format your directory structure and the index.php file. The final template is simple but covers all aspects of creating the template – as start for your new template or website creation using Joomla.

DotNetNuke Opensource web portal

By Jonathan Camp

SourceForge.net: Software Map: “DotNetNuke – An open source Web Portal Framework / Content Management System application written in ASP.NET / VB.NET for the Windows OS platform.”