Clarkosaurus

I’ve been slowly moving all my web sites over to Joomla this year and I really have to say that I like it. I’m a doctor, not a programmer, so I like to be able to grab and install components and modules (and templates!) that do what I want, install them, and off I go. Even if they cost a little money.

One component in particular has been a godsend: Joomla Updater by Intellispire software. It does two things really, really well:

1. It tells me when there’s a new update to Joomla 1.5 and can do the installation for me.  I’ve used the updater my hosting service offers and it failed several times.

2. It tells me when there are updates to components and plugins that I have installed and can do the installation for me, thus saving me the time of having to go to developer sites to check for new version personally.

Both are huge time savers for a non-programmer like myself. Nick Temple, the owner, is also ‘Joomla Smart’ and I find that, in general, associating with smart people makes me look good, too.

Or should I say, I knew I was hacked for the first time today? A hacker managed to insert a link to an executable file on one of the sites that I run with Joomla. I’m not sure how they got their nose under the tent, but they did. I finally managed to fix everything and, of course, changed all passwords (good thing I have 1Password to keep track of all of those long passwords!).

GCalendar is a very nice component or Joomla 1.5 that can display data from a specific Google calendar as a module on your Joomla site. I just figured out that turning on Search Engine Optimization interferes with Gcalendar and results in the module showing no upcoming events. Turn off SEO and everyting works fine.