10+ Joomla, Web Development and Business blog posts of the week

Last week we asked you to recommend your favorite online reading resources for web developers and others in the Joomla industry. Combined with what’s in my RSS reader, here’s the first result. Enjoy!

Click on the headings to read the blog posts (opens in a new window/tab). If there’s a blog post you like, we’ve made it easy for you to spread the word by tweeting the text under each description. (more…)

Tags: blogging, Copywriting, development, Joomla, technology

Should I use a relative or absolute url?

There is nothing more annoying then moving a website to a new domain name, and finding you, or somebody else, used a ton of absolute links.

Now you have to scour code and articles to fix them, since they are pointing to the old domain. Is there a better solution? Enter, relative links.

oookay, first things first. What’s the difference?

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How to recover your lost admin password in Joomla

At some point in your life you will do something silly and somehow not be able to login to your Joomla install with your admin account.  Your client will change something or you mistype a password….who knows, but it happens from time to time.

Crap! How do I get in here again?

Typically the first thing people will do is dig into their database, snoop around jos_users for the admin account, and then see an entry for password that is not what they remember putting in. This is because the password is one way MD5 hash, so if your site or database gets compromised your password isn’t sitting there in plain site.

Enough with the yapping.  How do I fix it?

First things first.  Let’s not forget the obvious.  Joomla has a “lost password” function.  Access it via this url:

http://site.com/index.php?option=com_user&view=remind

This should work fine assuming you know the email address on the admin account.  Otherwise, keep reading. (more…)

Tags: Joomla, joomla 1.5, security

How to fix xhtml and css validation errors in Virtuemart

In case you don’t already know, Virtuemart is an online shopping cart extension for Joomla! and is often listed as one of the most popular Joomla! extensions available.

Last week I received a private message on our forum from one of our members saying that his Virtuemart store was failing css validation and asked whether i would take a look to see if the issue was related to the template, or his Virtuemart setup.

After taking a look at the validation error and the xhtml output, it was easy to spot what was causing the problem. (more…)

Tags: css, ecommerce, joomla 1.5, validation, virtuemart

SEF urls | More than just good looks.

SEF urls not only look good, but they make your site harder to hack. Enabling SEF urls in your Joomla backend is a great thing to learn how to do.

SEF urls serves as a dual purpose feature

The biggest advantage to SEF urls is that your website viewers and users will have pretty urls  to look at. (more…)

Tags: usability, useful tips