The Official CASE Blog

Recently, The ACT Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Society approached CASE with a desire to redevelop their website. On a limited budget but with a very clear goal in mind, CASE was able to use our experience with Joomla combined with a new piece of software to complete the project in-house and without a graphic designer. For the cost, both groups are very happy with the result! The ACT MECFS Society provides monthly meetings, support courses and additional resources to those suffering from chronic fatigue and related conditions here in Canberra and has been for many years. So, we’re pleased to note the launch of their refreshed website here http://www.mecfscanberra.org.au and look forward to to working with them in the future!

Today’s workshop “Building Websites From The Ground Up” has proven very valuable for us and I assume everyone else. We’ve had a range of diverse speakers from a wide range of backgrounds who have really covered building a website from the ground up from concept to delivery. Viveka kicked off the day with a hugely detailed presentation on the Victorian AIDS Council’s efforts to develop their new website. She let us into the finer details of the planning process including objectives, constraints, assumptions and a lot, lot more. The key thing to take away from their experience, I think, is that documentation and planning has to be paramount in the process of developing a site, if you’re to end up with what you want! Also critical to the process was ensuring Government accessibility standards were met and that the staff were adequately trained in using the new software backend (Drupal). Have a look at their site which was launched late last year – great effort! http://www.vicaids.asn.au

Following on from Viveka’s presentation we had Andrew Johnson from FII who detailed a developer’s perspective on processes and jobs very similar to Viveka’s. He really emphasised the personal aspect to developing a website, encouraging looking at the task as developing a relationship between the developer and the organisation you (they’re) developing for. Returned to frequently was the idea that it was a good idea to actually like the client you’re working for. If you don’t…consider not taking the job! FII are big on Joomla which is great to see. They’ve got a range of projects on the go and we can recommend checking out their site! http://www.footefrancis.com.au

If that wasn’t enough (and it could have been) Gary Barber from Radharc weighed in on all things Information Architecture. Detailed, to say the least! He offered suggestions on how to better survey and study a userbase so that more appropriate development decisions could be made. He also showed us multiple ways of considering content, how we might look at it differently and how we might spot patterns. Surprisingly, something as mundane as sorting cards turned out to be a great way (through discussion, not necessarily the final arrangement of the cards!) to organise information in way everyone can understand or at least is happy with. Survey, observations, interviews, analytics! Details about these and more can be found at Gary’s site http://www.radharc.com.au

A slightly re-arranged schedule and a relateively relaxed atmosphere after lunch resulted in an expert’s panel on web content management systems. Joomla, Wordpres and Drupal all represented (Silverstripe gets a mention), the importance of keeping ALL of your web software up-to-date was reiterated by myself a few times. Seriously, you’ll get hacked if you don’t stay up to date. Andrew and Vivecka got to field followup questions from an engaged audience and everyone seemed pretty satisfied.

Following afternoon tea an enthusiastic/passionate discussion about domain names in Australia and abroad ensued. Darrell’s position on the auDA policy review panel allowed everyone to get a bit of insight into the domains industry and the history that preceeded it’s current state. Do .com.aus get more traffic? Are they more appropriate than asn.au? What would happen if Australia’s domain policy ended up matching the American free-for-all? There were a range of diverse opinions and everyone came away with something to think about…

Overall a very valuable day and we’re glad we attended! This is actually an event that runs prior to Making Links 2010 proper which of course we’ll be attending. We’ll continue the coverage here and of course you can follow the Twitter stream at #ml10 http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23ml10

We’re pleased to release the next episode in our occasional podcast series. This time I head out of the studio to visit ACT Senator Kate Lundy. We discuss using Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter, WordPress and Joomla, get her views on the proposed national broadband network and how she feels about funding to community organisations.

To listen to this podcast head over to the official CASE podcast page!

In this tutorial you will be shown how to upload an image to your website using Joomla’s Media Manager.

In this tutorial you will be shown how to use Joomla’s built in WYSIWYG text editor to add a hyperlink to your article, insert an image into your article and add a “Read More” link in your article.

If you’re running Joomla on any of your websites be aware that there is a major security update available. This update will protect your site from a range of exploits discovered in the current verson of Joomla. From the security mailing list:

[20090302] – Core – com_content XSS
Posted: 25 Mar 2009 10:08 AM PDT
Project: Joomla!
SubProject: com_content
Severity: Low
Versions: 1.5.9 and all previous 1.5 releases
Exploit type: XSS
Reported Date: 2009-March-12
Fixed Date: 2009-March-27
Description

A XSS vulnerability exists in the category view of com_content.

Affected Installs:

All 1.5.x installs prior to and including 1.5.9 are affected.

Solution:

Upgrade to latest Joomla! version (1.5.10 or newer).

[20090301] – Core – Multiple XSS/CSRF
Posted: 25 Mar 2009 10:02 AM PDT
Project: Joomla!
SubProject: Multiple
Severity: Moderate
Versions: 1.5.9 and all previous 1.5 releases
Exploit type: XSS and CSRV
Reported Date: 2009-February-15
Fixed Date: 2009-March-27
Description:

A series of XSS and CSRF faults exist in the administrator application.  Affected administrator components include com_admin, com_media, com_search.  Both com_admin and com_search contain XSS vulnerabilities, and com_media contains 2 CSRF vulnerabilities.

Affected Installs:

All 1.5.x installs prior to and including 1.5.9 are affected.  The com_search XSS vulnerability requires that “Gather Search Statistics” be enabled to be exploitable (Disabled by default).

Solution:

Upgrade to latest Joomla! version (1.5.10 or newer).

In this tutorial you are show how to install a template into Joomla 1.5.

So if you’re running Joomla or thinking about running Joomla, you might want to check out this humorous page over at the official Joomla documentation Wiki. It lists the top ten terrible things you could do while using Joomla, and how to avoid doing them. If you are guilty of doing any one of the ten, you need to change the way you do things!

Three of my favourites are:

4. Trust third-party extensions.
7. Use the same username and password for everything.
9. Don’t waste time with regular backups.

Click here to check out the whole list.

In this latest CASE video tutorial you are shown where to find the login page for the Joomla! administrator’s area. Once you’ve found it, bookmark it!

At CASE we’ve just begun to produce a series of free, online, video tutorials that address issues with software that our member organisations use to do their job. Starting with the web content management system Joomla! we plan to release a host of videos that teach the simple (and the not so simple!) lessons that we’ve learned over the years. To start off with, logging into Joomla 1.5: