Steve’s Blog

How to Reset a Lost SuperAdmin Password

If you do lose your SuperAdmin password for Joomla, don’t worry because theres an easy way to get it back. Just login to your MySQL database and run this query for

Versions up to Joomla 1.0.12.

UPDATE `jos_users` SET `name` = ‘admin’, `password` = ‘21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3’ WHERE `id` =62 LIMIT 1 ;

Versions from Joomla 1.0.13 to 1.0.15

UPDATE `jos_users` SET `name` = ‘admin’, `password` = ‘af9083d4b82dbc0745b124db3b3cf15d:M0WuLowO4rtRTddG’ WHERE `id` =62 LIMIT 1 ;

Your username will now be admin and your password will be admin also.

If you’re running an older version of Joomla or Mambo, you might need to change jos_users to mos_users.

If you’d like to change your password to something other than admin, go to http://www.allhype.co.uk and you can encrypt your password using MD5 – the same system Joomla uses.

Why Use a Content Management System?

Is there anything more off-putting than a visiting website to buy something and seeing © 1998 at the bottom? Well, yes‚Ķ.trying to keep your site up-to-date and relevant can seem equally disheartening.

A few years ago, if you‚Äôre company had some exciting news you‚Äôd call up your web-designer, hand over $200, wait in-line while they dealt with their other clients, finally get your small changes made, see they‚Äôd made a mistake, call them up, wait in line…

Well, people have been working on software to simplify that whole frustrating process and put the power to update your websites into YOUR hands. If you’re looking for an easy way to publish and manage your company’s news and information online, you might consider Content Management Systems (CMS). At first sight, a CMS might be mistaken for a blog, but although similar they have several clear advantages.

WHY NOT TO USE A BLOG

A lot of people keep blogs but there are key reasons why they are generally considered inappropriate for companies:

  1. To make a really interesting blog you need to allow people to comment on your articles. This can work if you have a lot of time to manage the comments but otherwise they can fill up quickly with spam, rude comments and other things that will reflect badly on your company.
  2. Blogs thrive on controversial and outlandish opinions. That means your company needs to keep up a constant stream of patter. This isn’t recommended unless you’re building a business on the back of your personality ala Donald Trump from “the Apprentice” or Jim Kramer from “Mad Money”.
  3. They are limited in their what they can do. Most blogs don’t offer the possibility of adding an online store, a portfolio of your company’s work or calendar of events. A CMS can do all of this.

WHY USE A CMS

  1. The key idea behind a Content Management System is that people need a really easy way to manage and categorise their content. So if you write an article about a project your company has just finished you can store it under “Projects”. If its about a new member of staff then it can be filed under “Staff”. A good CMS is something your grandmother could understand and run.
  2. A CMS expands easily with your company. If you’d like to add a photo gallery, portfolio, event calendar or other new feature, it can be done with a few mouse clicks. The software has been already written and developed. The possibilities are numerous.
  3. Large numbers of developers work on CMS software. There’s a phrase in web design called “Golden Handcuffs”. Basically it means that once a designer has their hands on your site they can make it so complex that you have to keep hiring them because only they can understand it. With a CMS you can easily find someone plenty of other people to help you out.
  4. Most are free. Some are for sale but many high-quality CMS are distributed free-of-charge.

Overall, a CMS can offer an excellent way to make sure that your site welcomes visitors with your latest news and a tagline that reads © 2006.

WHICH CMS TO CONSIDER

  • Joomla (www.joomla.org). Regarded as the most user-friendly of all CMS.
  • Drupal (www.drupal.org). Good if you need lots of users with the permission to do different tasks on the site.
  • To take a trial run of many free CMSs you can visit www.opensourcecms.com

E-Mail for Busy Professionals

This came about after talking to a client who runs a big company that advertises widely. He asked me why the vast majority of his leads came via his website or the phone when he took such good care to place his e-mail address at top of each advertisement. Why did no-one seem to use or remember it?

Our subsequent conversation produced advice that I hope will be useful for everyone else out there who uses their e-mail as a business tool:

Don’t Use a Free E-mail Address

That includes Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, BellSouth, Alltell and others. There are given away free to anyone who wants to sign up. That image doesn’t match with the professionalism that most businesses want convey.

Do Use an E-mail Address Based on Your Web Address.

When you’re advertising, its vital to make things as simple as possible. People will be confused if your web address is www.IsellHouses.com but your e-mail address is [email protected]. As a quick test, I went through two widely-distributed. magazines, Over half of the advertisers had committed this simple mistake.

Simplify things by setting up an e-mail address such as [email protected]. I sometimes hear the reply that “I haven’t done this yet, because its too difficult”. Well, if you can’t find a friend, your computer-savvy son or anyone else to help you master the intricacies of Outlook Express, there are websites such as Mail2Web.com where you can pick up your e-mail directly. The technical term for e-mail like this is POP3.

Do Advertise Your E-mail on Every Page of Your Website

It’s a myth to think that you are automatically opening yourself up to spam by placing your e-mail on the web as often as possible. With a little snippet of code you can easily protect your e-mail. Either your webdesigner can help with this or by searching Google for “Hide Your E-mail Address from Spam” you’ll be able to find the answer easily. Your e-mail address is much too important to hide away.

Don’t Put Your Logo or Any Images in Your E-mail

There are numerous problems cause by adding an image to every e-mail you send out, but I‚Äôll just list a couple here. First, you’ll mislead people who receive your e-mail and see that there is an attachment to your e-mail. Second, some e-mail software can misread a logo attached to a signature and cause it to repeat all over the background of the e-mail.. The same advice goes for using odd fonts, bright colors and long-winded company details in your signature. Keep it simple.

Invision Power Board 2: A User Guide

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Remember the days when software came in a big box with one small disc, lots of loose paper and a big, thick manual? Nowadays software is often downloaded with just a mouse click, which means no paper warranty to loose and no manual to flick through. This leaves an opening for companies that want to sell you that missing manual. Invision Power Board 2: A User Guide from Packt Publishing is just such a book. Read more >>

Invision Power Board 2: A User Guide

Remember the days when software came in a big box with one small disc, lots of loose paper and a big, thick manual? Nowadays software is often downloaded with just a mouse click, which means no paper warranty to mislay and no manual to flick through. This leaves an opening for companies that want to sell you that missing manual. Invision Power Board 2: A User Guide from Packt Publishing is just such a book.

Chapter 1 gives you and overview of IPB, its history and its benefits. Ideally I would be nice to seen a comparison of IPB to rival forums, especially as most of IPBs rivals are given away free, but that would have distracted from the book? “manual” status.

Chapter 2 explains your options for purchasing IPB (it’s a minimum of $70) and then installing it. The whole procedure is not difficult and the book covers it in less than 10 pages.

Chapter 3 takes you through what the user will see. You get a tour that includes posting, searching, messaging and also the Calendar and the User Control Panel. Its easy to see how a relatively long chapter like this (nearly 30 pages) could be a great help to someone setting up an IPB for the first time.

Chapter 4 does the same for the administration section and is equally comprehensive. It is in Chapters 5 and 6 that the book moves from introducing us to IPB to telling us how to run a live site. These sections cover more advanced forum control and by the end I felt that a beginner would have had few problems following the explanations.

Chapter 7 is different from the rest of the book because it contains general advice on how to run a successful forum. Chapter 8 is the only part of the book that approaches IPB from anything like a technical angle. It explains how to manage the site’s skins and includes a discussion of how IPB achieves certain effects using CSS, XHTML and Macros.

All-in-all, IPB2AUG does what it does remarkably well. The book is small but well-written with copious images. Someone working quickly could use this book to set up and understand a site within 4 or 5 hours. How often could you say that about the brick-like book that you used to get out of the box?

Click here to read more about IPB2: A User Guide.

Mastering Mambo

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???Mastering Mambo??? is a new book for people running and building websites with the Mambo Content Management System., It was written in an awkward time, when the Mambo CMS was in the process of splitting from Joomla, but because the codebases of both projects is still so similar, ???Mastering Mambo??? is a relevant book for both Mambo and Joomla users.

Read more…>>

“Mastering Mambo” – New Book About the Mambo CMS

{amazon_product}1904811515{/amazon_product}"Mastering Mambo" is a new book for people running and building websites with the Mambo Content Management System., It was written in an awkward time, when the Mambo CMS was in the process of splitting from Joomla, but because the codebases of both projects is still so similar, "Mastering Mambo" is a relevant book for both Mambo and Joomla users.

Initially, I was a little confused about the target audience for this volume. The same publisher (Packt) also has a book called "Building Websites with Mambo" that would be more appropriate than for Mambo beginners. The authors, Tobias Hauser and Christian Wenz, describe this book as being for "dministrators, designers and developers" which encompasses a pretty wide group of people with diverse skill-levels.

The first part of the book begins by covering the most basic features such as how to logon, install components, change templates and so on. It would suit someone building a site for the first time with Mambo.

As it progresses, the book becomes more complex. There are chapters on Mambelfish, VirtueMart (called PHP-Shop here) and DocMan as well as chapters that summarise options for people wanting forums and galleries. By the time it gets to page 180 out of 250, the authors are describing how to develop your own modules and mambots. This is done in a clear way, with Mambo’s functions and variables explained quickly and concisely.

That completed, the third part of the book describes ways to complete a successful Mambo deployment. The Search Engine Optimisation chapter is OK, but could do with more information on producing a Google-friendly template rather than just human-readable URLs. The Accessibility chapter could also do with more Mambo-specific advice.

However, there are two excellent chapters in this final section. The chapter on security is very useful. It covers cross site scripting, SQL injection, unexpected user data and more. It offers smart advice and is reasonably detailed. Finally, the performance and caching chapter is short and sweet, particularly in its coverage of the uses that Zend software.

Overall, the book is well-written and has a lot of useful illustrations. Nonetheless, it suffers from two weaknesses. One is the unavoidable problem that software development moves more quickly than publishing process and some of the information here is inevitably out-of-date. The second is that although I liked "Mastering Mambo", I’m unsure who to recommend it for. Rather it is an all-round effort. Administrators can use the first part of the book. Developers new to Mambo will benefit from the second half.

You can buy "Mastering Mambo" via Amazon.com.

How to Sell on the Web

E-commerce has been around for more than 15 years now and people are increasingly comfortable opening their wallets online. However, I still come across a lot of websites that are a real turn-off to customers. Hopefully yours isn’t one of them, but just in case, here are my top four hints for making your website sleek, speedy and secure:

1) You need an SSL.

That stands for “Secure Socket Layer”. What does it mean? It means that a special form of encryption is used to protect the details of everyone who sends you information via your website. If you go to any big site such as PayPal.com or Amazon.com, look for two things. First, the http:// address will become https://. Second, there will be a little yellow padlock at the end of the bar that contains the website address.

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SSLs cost between $70 and $150 per year and you can buy them from nearly all web-hosting companies. For this small price you protect your customers` information and you protect yourself. Without an SSL, your company could well be legally liable for costs resulting from the theft of people’s personal data.

2) You need an online merchant account.

PayPal.com is the most widely accepted, but 2Checkout.com and Authorize.net are also strong contenders. They can handle the invoices and recipts automatically for you. If all you have is a form on your site to collect people’s data, then you will have to create all the paperwork yourself. On average, these merchants take around 3% of the payment but the ease-of-use make the cost worthwhile.

3) You need an Open-Source Shopping-Cart.

What does Open-Source mean? It means that the code needed to make the cart run can be viewed and changed by anyone. That means that if you decide that if you want to change from web designer that you are working with, it is easy to find another who can help. If you go with a shopping cart that is sold by just one company, then you will find yourself working with them forever after. Best of all, open-source software is free.

So which ones do I recommend? OSCommerce is the cream of the crop. Over 100,000 stores have been built with this software and it has the widest available number of extras available, including code that can integrate it with QuickBooks. Also good are ZenCart and VirtueMart. All three are well-documented with community forums to help you find answers to your questions.

4) You need a niche.

I find it hard to imagine people making money by opening a general store on the web. You don’t want to find yourself competing with Amazon.com and WalMart.com. However, one smart businessman from Marietta has made millions of dollars by just selling banjos (banjo.com) and unicycles (unicycle.com). Focus on whatever it is that you’re good at and don’t try to expand until after you’ve become successful.

How to Make a Killer Real Estate Website

In March, I talked about the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org), which is one of the most important places on the web to get your site listed. It is also one of the most difficult. In fact, a few people wrote to me after the article came out and agreed that it had been almost impossible for them to get listed in the Open Directory. Several of these people were realtors and when I was doing some research to help them out, I ran across this statement from someone who judges sites for the OD:

“there is one type of site that is becoming increasingly difficult to list: local real estate agents.”

The writer went on to explain that this was because most real estate sites nowadays were just bad, and for a number of reasons. So, for those who e-mailed, and for others out there, this month’s column can simply be titled: “How to Build a Great Real Estate Website”.

1) Do make your site personal. Have the contact details and a photo of the agent selling the house at the bottom of every listing. You need to associate yourself as closely as possible with your product.

2) Don’t use templates. Your company doesn’t have the same logo and the same staff as your rivals and so you shouldn’t have the same website. Also, the photos of the houses at the top of the template are often taken in California, Las Vegas or another part of the country. You are not selling those kinds of houses – you need photos of houses in North Georgia on the front page.

3) Do add a complete biography for all your agents. People want to see what you bring to the table. Often people who use templates will change one or two words in the biography and leave the rest untouched. I’ve seen one agent’s photo and life story repeated on multiple sites.

4) Don’t use the content provided by the company that you are working with. Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo, plus listings directories don’t like sites that are cookie-cutter versions of other website. Oh, and did I mention that customers also hate to see the same text and the same articles everywhere they surf on the web?

5) Do invest in your website. 2 out of every 3 homebuyers is looking online for houses and 2 out of 3 homebuyers are using the Internet to research their new home and find a real estate agent. A 2002 Realtor.org study revealed that these Internet Homebuyers spend more money and make their buying decision quicker than non-internet users. For less than price of one billboard by the highway, you have the opportunity to generate a lot of quality leads.