Charles on Software

Opinions about designing, programming and using software

Browsing Posts in Web Applications

Recently I was putting up another Joomla! site and ran into a problem with a module that I’d added: the module’s title wasn’t appearing, even though I’d configured the module to show the title.  I went into the Module Manager, opened the module in question, checked that “Show Title” in the “Details” section was set [...]

My SEO guy just asked me how to set the title tag on the home page of a site created with Joomla!.  Without thinking about it, I responded that the title is set using the title of the article.  He pointed out that it didn’t seem to be working on the home page, so I [...]

While testing a client’s Joomla! 1.5 site with various browsers, recently, I got the following error when testing with Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.example.com/index.php. Operation aborted. This was puzzling, as we had successfully tested the site before with IE6.  IE7 and IE8 were working fine.  A little checking of [...]

Chronoforms Chronoforms is an extension for Joomla! that allows you to easily create forms.  The most common uses are to email information to someone (e.g. the results of a contact form) or store it in a database for later use.  I’ve used it to implement basic contact forms, appointment request forms and membership applications.  It’s [...]

I was looking into vulnerabilities of the extensions used on one of my sites after having been compromised repeatedly, even after upgrading to Joomla 1.5.20 (the latest stable version).  I have GCalendar 2.2.4 and two other extensions installed, so I started searching for records of vulnerabilities.  I found the Secunia report from 2009 and then [...]

A client had a WordPress theme that made use of timthumb.php to generate thumbnail images on the fly.  If you check the documentation for the script, it tells you to set the permissions for the cache folder to “777″.  This is short-hand for “all users are allowed to read, write, create and execute files in [...]

Last month I reviewed the DJ-Promedical template for Joomla!.  A representative commented on the review and argued a couple of points that I made.  They pointed out a link to the documentation, which I have confirmed and reviewed.  As a result, I have updated the original review. In my review, I also stated that the [...]

I purchased the DJ-Promedical template from joomla-monster.com.  Here are some thoughts now that I’ve been using it for a while. Not a Joomla! 1.5 Template The first thing is that this is not a Joomla! 1.5 template, despite what joomla-monster.com says.  The template’s code contains many references to the Joomla! 1.0 API, and these references [...]

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve recently added Google Analytics to the company website and this blog.  I know that I should have done it long ago, but I’ve been too busy working on other people’s sites. Since the main site uses Joomla!, I looked through the various extensions for Joomla! that support Google Analytics in [...]

In order to have a better idea who is visiting the company web-site and this blog, I’ve added Google Analytics to both.  For this blog, I’m testing out Google Analyticator by Ronald Heft.  So far, I’m impressed.  It puts the required JavaScript on every page, which is the minimum that you’d expect.  It also has [...]