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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
On Thursday, Friday 16th at 16:00 UTC Joomla released version 4.2.8 with a major security fix. The vulnerability, they warned, was a very serious one and you would all need to update. However, the necessary information gap which follows a security release —so as not to tip off miscreants— has let rumours spread in such a way that they make people risk unnecessary damage to their site, or at least give the false impression that all Joomla sites have been “magically” hacked like we're in some Hollywood movie. That's not how the world works, so please let us explain exactly what is going on and you should not freak out.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
With the meteoric rise in popularity of Mastodon following the acquisition of The Bird Site Which Shall Not Be Named* by You-Know-Who* a question has been forming in everyone's head: “How can I display my toots (posts) timeline on my site?”. People looking for some Joomla modular embed code will be disappointed to find none. However, you need no third party module, no embed code, and no JavaScript! Everything you need is already included in Joomla itself.
* I've heard the new overlord is a very capricious and litigious fella. I am sure y'all know what I am talking about.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Over the years I have had the chance to review hundreds of Joomla! plugins written by different developers, typically when they are causing a site to break in unexpected ways. It turns out, most plugins suffer a few very common and easily preventable problems.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Two weeks ago I finally received a Mac mini M1 with the brand-new, ARM-based M1 (Apple Silicon) processor. There’s been a lot of speculation and conflicting information about its performance. I would like to talk about it in the context of web development. Just to give you an idea: it’s a monster worth every penny of its modest price.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Happy New Year 2021, everyone! This is the last part of my series on optimising Joomla sites. In the previous instalment we did some site building calisthenics. Today we'll talk about content. This is not necessarily a Joomla topic — it applies equally to WordPress, Drupal, Medium, Blogger and everything that publishes written words to the web.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
In the third part of this series I described how to squeeze more performance out of your site by optimizing the static media files. Today I'll talk about putting the finishing touches which make your site more polished and professional. They mostly have to do with how your site interacts with search engines and social networks but there's also a little bit of performance to be found in there. I think information about polishing your site is the best way to send off this year.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
In the second part of this series I described how to unlock a base level of performance out of your Joomla site with a few, simple changes. Today we're diving deeper into static media: JavaScript, CSS and image files. These changes are more involved but can turn a junker of a slow site into a decently performing one. Arguably, not all of these changes make sense for all sites but the performance benefits you get are substantial.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
In the first part of this series I described why tuning the performance of your site is something you should do for both philosophical and practical reasons, as well as where to start. That post was by necessity a bit generic. In the second part of this series we'll dive into some of the basic things you can do in Joomla to unlock a decent amount of performance.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Joomla is a very good CMS out of the box. It is reasonably fast, it has built-in support for structured data and even caching. Yet, it has an unwarranted bad reputation about being slow and bad for SEO. In this series of articles I will tell you how you can tune a Joomla 3 site to improve its SEO and PageSpeed score and how to avoid all the pitfalls when building your or your client's site. The end result is a site that's appealing to both search engines and living, breathing site visitors.
In this first part of the series we'll talk about why this is important, in general, and what are the obvious first steps you can take to get to that goal.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
The past few weeks the PHP world is abuzz with Expose, an Open Source alternative to ngrok. If you're not familiar with either, they both let you share a site hosted on your local web server using a subdomain that can be accessed over the Internet. This is great for sharing a site with your client, testing HTTPS behavior with a valid TLS certificate, developing social media / SSO integrations, testing sites on real mobile devices etc.
Expose lets you run your own server for the full white label experience. It's also free of charge – except for the cost of running your own server, of course. In this article I'll tell you how to create your own Expose server and share your Joomla site with it.