munyah » Joomla

Joomla Auto-Blogging with K2 & Feed Gator

munyah — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:19:41 +0000

Having been working on auto-blogging with WordPress for a few months now and I wondered aloud as to whether there was anything that could match some of the auto-blogging plugins available in Joomla.

I was quite chuffed to discover a tool called Feed Gator. Apparently its been around since Joomla 1.0 days; I didn’t know that, and neither did I know of auto-blogging then, so its cool.

As a matter of preference I ignore Joomla’s default content manager and rush to quickly install K2 just because its better and easier for most layman to understand. And so its a big plus that Feed Gator can feed into it; and you can separate each feed into categories, yey!

For the benefit of others, auto-blogging is the stealing art of content from other bloggers via RSS feeds. You take a bunch of feeds and create your own blog articles with them.

DOWNLOAD LINK : http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/news-production/automatic-articles/13573

Happy auto-blogging!

Joomla – fetching ‘GET’ Variable the proper way

munyah — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:20:27 +0000

So apparently there’s a lot of security risks in using our traditional $_GET['item'] within our custom developed modules / extensions. I for one am guilty of using a lot of GETs simply because they’re easy and pretty straight forward. So in order to dispense the ‘risk’ and combat some known exploits we’re advised to use the JRequest-class.

And we use it like so:

WRONG:

1	$category = $_GET['category'];

RIGHT:

1
2
3

$category = JRequest::getInt('categoryid'); //integer
$category = JRequest::getVar('category'); //mixed variable
$category = JRequest::getString('categoryname'); //string variable

How simple is that?? That small change in your extensions and modules will save you headaches with vulnerable exploits in your custom developments.

Happy coding; the proper way this time!!

Joomla

munyah — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:27:16 +0000

My first real love. In that time it was called Mambo. I must say that I wasn’t too happy with the split that eventually gave birth to Joomla. Mambo means ‘King’ in my native language (shona) and Joomla! means nothing…

According to the founders of Joomla! : Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone…. and other gibberish…. yes thats pretty much what it is!!

I don’t favor Joomla! at all, I just prefer it… most of the time!!