As I've written in the recent past, one of the most challenging endeavours for anyone experienced in Joomla! is trying to disseminate his own knowledge of the CMS to a complete newbie. Being a developer – instead of a tutor – puts me in an impossible position, as my understanding of the system is registered within me in a way that's impossible to transfer to a non-developer. Well, unless he's in for a steep learning curve and awkward tech-talk. Thankfully, there's Packt Publishing's new book, “Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide”, written by Eric Tiggeler. As promised, this is the full review of the book!

Don't miss the raffle at the end of the article!

As you all know, every new Joomla! installation comes with a Super Administrator account with a well-known user ID: 62. Nobody really knows for sure why 62 was chosen, but this can lead to your site's security being compromised. Why? It is a very well known value and potential hackers can take advantage of it in conjunction with another vulnerability to take control of your site. Known constants are a security nightmare as made clear in the case of the attack against Joomla! 1.5.5 which caused a lot of sites to be compromised as the researcher who found the vulnerability released it to the general public before the Joomla! team had a chance to fix it.

One easy workaround is to demote this well-known user account down to the Registered level and block it, hanging potential hackers to dry. However, in order to complete our security modification we do need another Super Administrator. The problem is that if you just create a new user his ID will be 63, which is not secure at all; it's a hacker's next best bet. So, we need a way to create a Super Administrator with a random ID, preferably in the 1-61 range which is otherwise unused in Joomla!. This is what we are going to do, folks, without even using phpMyAdmin for the task.

Note: You will be modifying your site's database. Even though the following procedure is well-tested, it's best to practice it on a local testing server first.

Link-A-Tron is a set of two Joomla! plug-ins, designed to help you with advanced link behaviour management in the Joomla! CMS. They can be used independently or in parallel for maximum control.

The “Link-A-Tron System Plug-in” takes care of:

• Base tag fixing. It resets the document's link base to the site's root instead of the current page. This will fix certain menu components which are missing icons whenever you enable SEF URLs at the expense of losing XHTML compliance.
• Canonical hinting. Includes a canonical URL “hint” instruction inside the page’s for Google and other search engines to use. It uses Joomla!’s router infrastructure to calculate the canonical URL, so it should work with third-party SEO components such as sh404SEF, AceSEF, etc.
• Canonical link redirection. If the current page’s URL differs from the canonical URL, it will promptly redirect the web client (be it a browser or a search engine spider) to the canonical URL, mitigating URL proliferation.

Each of these options can be separately toggled on and off in the plug-in configuration. Do note that all of these features are redundant if you are using AceSEF. This component is able to automatically handle all of the above.

The “Link-A-Tron Content Plug-In”, on the other hand, takes care of the remaining issues:

• Link migration. You supply a list of addresses where your site used to be installed and the plug-in will replace all links to URLs referencing those sites with ones which point to the current site. Let's say that you had a site on www.example.com and you moved it to www.example.net. You just supply the old domain name (www.example.com) and all links (<a> tags) and images (<img> tags) will be rewritten to replace the old domain with the new domain. This is useful when migrating your site to a new domain using Akeeba Backup!
• Non SEF URL rewriting. It replaces links – found inside your content items – to non SEO URLs so that they point to their SEO equivalent. For example, it will transform the ugly http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_plants&catid=1:fruits&id=1:banana URL to the SEO-friendly http://www.example.com/fruits/banana.html URL.

Do note that most SEF components will take care of non SEF URL rewriting, however none of them handles link migration. Maybe this is the most useful feature of Link-a-tron.

This plug-in works independently from the system plug-in and its options can be separately toggled on and off in the plug-in configuration. Since it is a content plug-in, it will be used in Joomla! articles, as well as any other content extension which makes use of content plug-ins, such as K2 by JoomlaWorks, or Visitor 2 Buyer by yours truly.

You can download the system and content plug-ins from the Downloads section of this site.

Οι οδηγίες είναι κοινές για όλες τις συσκευές, ανεξαρτήτως έκδοσης και ενεργού γλώσσας λειτουργικού, και ακολουθούν την κοινή διαδικασία εγκατάστασης λογισμικού σε συσκευές με Windows Mobile από αρχεία CAB.

Κατεβάστε το CAB αρχείο εγκατάστασης από την περιοχή μεταφορτώσεων του ιστοχώρου και μεταφέρετέ το σε οποιονδήποτε κατάλογο στην συσκευή σας. Μην το αποσυμπιέσετε πριν την μεταφορά! Στην συνέχεια, χρησιμοποιώντας την Αναζήτηση Αρχείων (File Explorer), βρείτε το αρχείο και πατήστε το πενάκι (tap) πάνω του. Ακολουθήστε τα βήματα του οδηγού εγκατάστασης. Μετά το τέλος του οδηγού, το πρόγραμμα θα βρίσκεται διαθέσιμο στο μενού Προγράμματα (Programs) της συσκευής σας.

Hello, I am Nicholas Dionysopoulos, a Mechanical Engineer from Greece who turned into Web Developer very early in his career. Chances are you already know me because of the software I develop. I am the Lead Developer of Akeeba Backup - that's an open source backup component for the magnificent Joomla! CMS - and author of a few other free programs, all available from this site.

I grew up and live in Nikaia, a suburb of Athens, Greece. I have acquired a degree in Mechanical Engineering, having attended the school of Mechanical Engineering of Aristotle's University of Thessaloniki. I've fulfilled my military obligations in the ranks of the Hellenic Air Force, serving as a reserve sergeant.

Since then I have worked as business consultant, a construction site engineer, after sales service supervisor and - ultimately - left engineering behind me, forming my own company in February 2010 to commercially support Akeeba Backup and my web development projects.

Programming experience

I have developed a strong interest in programming ever since before I actually bought a computer. I was intrigued by the idea of instructing a machine to perform specific task. At the age of eleven I bought my first computer, an Amstrad CPC 6128+, and starting learning the BASIC language. A few years - and several computers - later, I have programmed in different variants of BASIC (Locomotive BASIC, GW-BASIC, QBASIC, Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications, Visual Basic .NET, VBscript ASP), quite a few variants of Pascal (Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal, Turbo Pascal for Windows, Delphi, Free Pascal, Lazarus), 8086 assembly, PHP and JavaScript.

During my last year in university and though the end of my military obligations I had been collaborating with Concise Technologies, developing applications in Delphi, designing standards-compliant web sites and building or deploying PHP applications. Since 2006 I am maintaining the Joomla!-powered site of the Hellenic Association for Adult Education, a non-governmental organization in Greece.

I am the lead developer and Development Group Lead of Akeeba Backup, an open-source backup component for the open-source Joomla! CMS. The entire component is built with pattern-based codebase atop Joomla!'s PHP framework and it is doing really great. At this point, it is the only open source alternative for complete site backup (files, database and a restore script). It is not the only way to perform this task; it's merely the easiest - and I watch you write that it's the best as well.

Hello and welcome to Dionysopoulos.me!

I am Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos, a Mechanical Engineer turned web developer from Greece. Among other things, I've been developing AkeebaBackup (formerly JoomlaPack) since 2006. I specialize in Joomla! development, but I have also undertaken other PHP related projects in the past. This site is all about my articles, blog posts and software I have developed. I hope you enjoy it and I'll be glad to receive your feedback through the comments feature of each article.

Whenever I say to a circle of friends that I am a Joomla! developer, the dreaded question always pops up: “Hey, I've heard that this Joomla! thing is good, can you help me build my own site?”. This usually makes me frown because a. the person who asks is a complete newbie to Joomla! and/or web sites and b. they don't want to hire a web developer – like me, for example – to build their site. If I respond positively to such an inquiry I will end up building a site, explaining step-by-step how I do that, do a lot of training and not get paid for my time (no, buying me a coffee doesn't make up for 80 hours of lost time, sorry). If I respond negatively I am usually accused of elitism, or even confronted with the equally dreaded “Oh, come on, you'll just teach me the basics, I don't want to steal your job”. Awh... What can anyone do in such an awkward situation?