Technology Blog

If you find yourself in the position of having lost your Joomla administrator password, then don't despair. This password can be reset directly in the database by entering phpMyAdmin on your webhosting account.  In phpMyAdmin the simplest option is to change the password in the database to a known value.

These instructions show how to manually change a password to the word "secret" :

1) Navigate to phpMyAdmin and select the database for the Joomla! site in the left-hand drop-down list box. This will show the database tables on the left side of the screen.

2) Find and click on the table with "_users" appended in the list of tables (note: you may have a prefix that is not jos_, simply go to the _users table for your prefix).

3) Click on the "Browse" button in the top toolbar. This will show all of the users that are set up for this site.

4) Find the user whose password you want to change and press the Edit icon for this row.

5) A form will display that allows you to edit the password field.

Copy the value "d2064d358136996bd22421584a7cb33e:trd7TvKHx6dMeoMmBVxYmg0vuXEA4199" into the password field and press the Go button.

6) phpMyAdmin should display the message "Affected rows: 1". At this point, the password should be changed to "secret".

7) Log in with this user and password and change the password of this user to a secure value. Check all of the users using the User Manager to make sure they are legitimate. If you have been hacked, you may want to change all of the passwords on the site.

After a while the Joomla redirect links table tend to be cluttered with a lot of links, and you might want to remove all these as a part of your maintenance.

To clean out these can take an awful long time, and after these are deleted, you need to do the same again to clear out the trash.

However, the easiest way to clean out all these links and empty the redirect manager table alltogether is to simply empty the table #__redirect_links by using phpmyadmin.

Have you got Windows 8, and are still looking for the good old start button?

Download Classic Shell from www.classicshell.net

Highly recommendable.

To install Linux Mint most people download the dvd image and create a bootable DVD.

There is however a much easier way.

Simply create a bootable USB stick with Linux Mint by downloading the "Universal USB Installer".

You can find the UUI and instructions on http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/

Joomla is a great platform for developing portals and websites.

What many people tend to forget is that CMS platforms like Joomla and Wordpress are managed through an online administrator login.

The disadvantage with this is that hackers are trying to guess the passwords using automated tools.

On a standard Joomla website a hacker can find the administrator login page by adding /administrator to the website url.

Likewise on a standard Wordpress site you can simply add /wp-admin to the url to get to the admin login.

Example:

Your site is:    www.example.com

Joomla

If your site is a Joomla site then the administrator login will by default be:

www.example.com/administrator

Wordpress

If your site is a Wordpress site then the administrator login will by default be:

www.example.com/wp-admin

What to do ?

To improve the security of my sites I therefore always disable the default administrator url, and also monitor all attempts to access the default admin login url's. For Joomla sites you could e.g. use the extension called Adminexile which will notify you by email of any attempt, and also dynamically ban perpetrators for a timelimited period.

By doing so, you can monitor all such hacker attempts and take further measurements should they be persistent.