One of the best things about running a blog is the opportunity to read comments posted by people who are smarter and more experienced in many areas.
Today, I’m going to dig back into the Alledia archives and pull up and some great tips and tricks posted by readers.
How to Reset a Lost SuperAdmin Password
Zorro from www.nitsche.org points out that Joomla 1.0.13 has changed password handling and added a SALT (encryption) to the password field. So if you have lost your superadministrator password, you need to run a new database query to recover it:
UPDATE `jos_users` SET `name` = ‘admin’, `password` = ‘af9083d4b82dbc0745b124db3b3cf15d:M0WuLowO4rtRTddG’ WHERE `id` =62 LIMIT 1 ;
Removing Joomla’s Dynamic URLs from Search Results
Often when running Joomla’s SEF URLs you’ll find that dynamic URLs still manage to get indexed and create duplicate content. We’ve discussed several ways of dealing with this using Yahoo’s Site Explorer and Joomla’s robots.txt file, but Trichosis (no URL given) came up with a very elegant solution. Simply add this to your robots.txt:
disallow: /*?*
Using Your Joomla Sections and Categories to Improve SEO
Barrie from www.compassdesigns.net responded to our post about getting Page Rank flowing through your Joomla site by posting links to these two great articles:
- http://www.searchengineguide.com/orbidex/2002/0222_orb1.html
- http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10003/3060.htm
Using SIFR (Funky Fonts) On Your Joomla Site
In response to our post about using the SIFR technique to add non-web safe fonts to your Joomla site, Brian from www.uklinux.net pointed out a website where anyone can generate SIFR files without needing to dowload any software: http://ianpurton.com/sifr/
Improving Search on Your Joomla Site
Zorro (again) from www.nitsche.org demonstrated how to make your Joomla site search more useful. Instead of searching for any of the terms in a query, it searches for all of the terms:
In /components/com_search/search.html.php:
Find line 126, replace ‘any’ with ‘all’.
Find line 215, replace ‘any’ with ‘all’.
Also, in /components/com_search/search.php:
Find line 102, replace ‘any’ with ‘all’.
There’s also a post on Joomla.org showing how to set "exact match" as the default. We’re using that hack on Alledia.com because it seems to bring the most useful results.