The CartaNova team encountered a nasty bot attacking one of our client Joomla! 1.5 web sites. The hack is popularly known as the PHP5.php hack or "Pharma Hack".

The hack changes the Google search results description to show adverts for your standard array of spam-pharma-products. Why? No idea. It is a clever little bug, as site owners and other folks who have the site bookmarked may be unaware of the infection for quite some time. Here's a fix...

On March 2, we participated in Hamilton’s first DemoCamp. We had a great time courtesy of the amazing and unbelievably helpful folks at the Hamilton Innovation Factory and the Greater Hamilton Computing and Software Network.  For the first time in public, we showed Weever, our true HTML5 "instantly-make-your-site-a-web-app" service (in this case for the Joomla! CMS).

Quick tip: JCE is a wonderful editor for Joomla! - free, useful and powerful.  But after a default installation (particularly with the useful K2 CCK for Joomla!) we often see the following error message:

* The file name 'templates/templatename/css/editor_content.css' was entered in the JCE Custom CSS field. This file could not be found in the default templates folder. *The css file '/templates/system/css/editor.css' is being used instead.

Here's the fix:

Joomla! Tip: Check out our extensive free library of Joomla! Tutorial Videos at HoldenCreative.com (my former freelance business, I licensed these vids a few years ago). We'll be introducing new videos for Joomla! 1.6 to CartaNova soon, but for now you can find Beginner, Advanced and Designer tutorials for Joomla! 1.5 and the older  Joomla! 1.0 platform.  Feel free to use these tutorials as you wish!

Note: Joomla.org also has some great under-used tutorials in the Documentation area.

Not a trick, but an important tip for Joomla! Web Developers: Don't forget to utilize the Joomla! Site Showcase.  The showcase is a free, volunteer-managed place to display the power and extensibility of Joomla!.  Being a highly moderated area for 'good' web sites, the showcase also appears to have a great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) value with Google.  This makes sense, as Google increasingly emphasizes 'brands' and 'trust' in search engine metrics.

We recently submitted our site for Alcast Technologies to the showcase and were surprised by a corresponding surge in visitor traffic and customer inquriries as a result.  So Joomla! Web Designers, what are you waiting for?  Submit your site!

What do Tony Hawyard, Pete Rose, Jospeh Hazelwood and Homer Simpson have in common? They are all on our new 404 Error Page which features some of the Worst-Employees-Ever. Who else should be included?