Je vous promets, cet article n'a rien à voir avec la religion, il traite de la sécurité des sites web. Le démon que je mentionne se refaire au fait d'ouvrir une éventuelle porte pour permettre aux pirates de compromettre votre site. Cet article est long mais je vous promets que vous allez apprendre des choses que vous n'avez jamais imaginées. Faisons la lumière sur le mystère du numéro 777 et tuons le démon !

As you all know, Joomla! 1.7 brought a major change in the direction of the project. The self-developed libraries upon which the Joomla! CMS is built on are now spun-off as a separate project, called Joomla! Platform. The goal of this split is to allow developers to built applications on the Joomla! Platform without having to install the Joomla! CMS and all the unnecessary cruft this brings with it. The vision is to have a standalone framework, much like Zend Framework, CakePHP, CodeIgniter or Symphony, with a twist. It will be equally easy to create a component for the Joomla! CMS, a standalone web application or a CLI (command-line) application without much changes in the source code or, at least, reusing big portions of it. A mighty, noble goal. Is it possible? Are we there yet? Is it worth it?

It's mid-May now and we're less than a month away from Joomla! 1.7's release. As you may have already heard, Joomla! 1.7 is more or less the same as Joomla! 1.6 with a few additions for developers. With Joomla! 1.8, the next Long Term Support release, closing in it is a good time to start considering the improvements in the new generation of the CMS and preparing yourself for a migration. What you need, as a site integrator and user, is a guided tour of Joomla! 1.6 and beyond.

You may have seen me on quite a few occasions advising against using Joomla! 1.6. You have most certainly seen that I was the first developer to embrace Joomla! 1.6 and my extensions were among the first to fully support Joomla! 1.6. Actually, Akeeba Backup was the first major extension and the first third-party extension ever to run natively on Joomla! 1.6. So what is that? Am I hypocrite? Am I suffering from schizophrenia? Or is it something more unalarming?

The Christmas season is linked with people making gifts to each other, or even themselves. What's a better gift than a book? I was fortunate enough to receive a free copy of Packt's new book, Joomla! 1.5 Cookbook, a great resource for Joomla! site owners written by a knowledgable member of the Joomla! community and personal friend Tom Canavan. Let's take a more in-depth look at it.

Time over time, users make an unsurprising feature request on the AkeebaBackup.com forum: “Can you make it so that I can synchronize a live and dev site without a full backup?”. The typical answer they get is “No, because of technical issues”. I was surprised to see that a trending idea in ideas.joomla.org is exactly that – not to mention that it was submitted by one of the people very actively engaged with core Joomla! development. In the hope that anyone cares to read, I am going to make the case against such a feature, proving why it is a Really Bad Idea™.

Disclosure: I have the know-how to create such a feature and make it work on most servers and most sites. I even have code infrastructure in place to easily make it happen, without having to start from scratch. This article is a breakdown of my research and spec notes when I was doing the feasibility study of such a feature. After reading this lengthy article, you'll hopefully understand why I decided to never put it to code and, most likely, agree with my choice too.

When I roam around the open Internet I sometimes find myself in front of nasty surprises. No, I don't mean what you think... I see code written so badly which, despite the author's best intentions, manages to somehow introduce more problems than the single problem it tried to tackle. One such case was a set of patches regarding alternative layouts about to make it in Joomla! 1.6. Since the author of the patch doesn't get the damage caused, I'll take the challenge to explain it.

Joomla!’s temporary off-line mode is a very handy option to temporarily take your site down while performing maintenance —e.g. updating the Joomla! core or an extension— and is even suggested by the official documentation for the unfortunate time that your site has been compromised. However, is this really off-line, or are there any pitfalls you should be aware of?

Today Joomla! turns 5. It was five years ago when a handful of individuals decided to put community engagement and Freedom of Choice above profit and fork the Mambo CMS, forming one of the most successful 100% community-driven projects in the world: Joomla!

Most of us are already very experienced with Joomla! so as not to require any help building our own sites. Listening to the client's objectives we can intuitively translate their needs to extensions and potential set-ups. This knowledge comes from years of experience in doing this kind of work. However, this isn't always the case with those who are fresh to the world of the Joomla! CMS. What they need is some guidance or, if you'd like, a way to “seed” their brains with adequate ideas to get them started. I was recently reading Packt Publishing's new book, “Joomla! 1.5 Site Blueprints”, which seems to fit nicely this bill.