PICnet Blog

RobS over at Joomla just posted about the Joomla winning an award for security:

“During what is called the “Deface Realtime Compo” Competition up to 150 Security Specialists, hackers, and crackers bomarded the CMS with attacks for 2 days straight without success. Both Joomla! and PHP-Nuke were evaluated during the competition and both systems received positive evaluations. Along with the positive evaluation, we received a certification from the WebSecure Group, declaring that Joomla! was reliable and recommended for use.”

Read it here.

There are many reasons to like Joomla, but probably none more persuasive than the power and friendliness of the community itself. Tonight, after many many hours of Pradeep and I trying to crack a problem we’re having with mass uploading users for a client of ours, I decided to reach out to my good buddy from the LinuxWorld SF conference, Waseem.

Waseem came through in style.

From a basic question on the problem we’ve been facing, our friend from Joomlashack got some added advice from ’shacker Dean, and within a few minutes, they’d helped me find two more solutions to our problem that we hadn’t found in more than four days of research.

For those looking for some user import options, there’s:

• JUICE
• D4J User Sync Component

My advice to Joomla users: buy from Joomlashack. Knowledgeable, smart, and funny guys; we at PICnet like doing business with them.

If you want JomComment to work with Joom!Fish you’ll need to modify the components/com_jomcomment/jom_comment.php file in several places. Run a search for languages and you will find include statements which are loading the defined langauge file. First bring $mosConfig_lang into local scope by adding it to the line of global variables for the function you are editing. Then right before the include statement reset the $pc_language variable to equal $mosConfig_lang.’.php’ and you’re all good.

Google has done it again. The great people at google have tried to make our lives easier with their new invention of Google Code Search. Now I can find bits of code that I otherwise wouldn’t have found. How does it do this? Well google now can traverse into compressed files like .zips and .tar.gz. What does this mean for you? You know how your a good webmaster and make make backups of your websites as websitebackup.tar.gz? Your configuration.php file is one of the files that you just backed up. Guess what. Now everyone on google code search can see your user name and password for your mysql database. How do I fight this? you might as. Simply put your backups below your website directory so it isn’t accessable via the web. Read more about it from the Joomla Developers here and from a Slashdot article here.

Little posting on webmonkey of why us geeks celebrate Halloween and Christmas both on Oct 31 and Dec 25. Its a joke, play on words (or numbers in this case). But I am going to warn you, it’s a bit of reading and a bit of math. So get your thinking caps on. Read it here.

So I was just discussing some great stuff with Ryan this morning about integrating Odeo’s Studio into Soapbox. Odeo is the largest podcast directory outside of iTunes. Some exciting stuff is going to developed here. Odeo Studio steps it up with its easy to use Podcast creator. It is a great way to record and post your Podcasts. Integration into your site is easy too. Just a few settings and your ready to have your podcasts up and running. Might be easier than starting up a Soapbox site

I’ve been converting designs to Joomla templates for a lot of clients lately, and one question I’ve gotten from designers is whether to use tables or divs? We all know about the standards push for a pure CSS layout in our sites but currently there is no avoiding the dreaded tables in Joomla. Sure you can switch the output layout for modules but most components just don’t offer that option. So, what’s a designer to do?

Like most of the Joomla community we like to leave that up to the designer. After all, like some stop signs, that standard is just a recommendation, right? (PICnet does not advocate running stop signs) CSS layout is a great idea but there are some myths right now concerning accessibility and search engine optimization. It is still possible with tables to be 508 compliant and Google will not ignore the web site.

So for now, until the Joomla core is upgraded, don’t lose sleep over tables in your template. They’re going to show up in your output anyway.

One of those technical buggers that I couldn’t figure out, is how to make your command prompt run through a directory and change the permissions (chmod) for only directories in it. Then, just to top it off, do it recursively:

find /dir/to/chmod/all/dirs -type d -exec chmod -R 755 {} \;

That helps us, hope it helps others!  Many thanks to linox.be for the tip!

Earlier today, I had the opportunity to meet with a Congressional Office on Capitol Hill to discuss some ideas on renewing their official website. I met with some keen and idealistic staff members in a small office in the Canon House Office Building. During the hour-long meeting, there were many questions at hand - “How to best deliver the Congressman’s services to his constituents?”, “How to make this online effort citizen-centric?”, “How can PICnet help?”.

On my subway ride back to PICnet’s downtown DC office, I realized that PICnet had built a strong and unique reputation on the Hill of being a reputable, reliable, and honest firm. And that we were fortunate to engage in such conversation with in the political hotspot of this country.

While my fellow PICnetters and I find ourselves lost in our cubicles trying to seek goals that are greater than ourselves, it is my job as a project manager, to pause and pat ourselves on the back. Why would I blog otherwise?

The latest Non-Profit Soapbox site to launch is the Center for Public Integrity’s Takings Initiative Accountability Project. This site was built in conjunction with the fantastic design team at Free Range Studios.
To learn more about what’s at stake in at least 5 western states, and the power that one very wealthy individual can have on our society and politics, we highly recommend you check out this site (especially all you left coasters!).

More details on the project’s goals below, as quoted from their Web site.

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