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...

Weever Apps, a project started by CartaNova and now lead by Rob and Andrew of CartaNova has now launched a "free mobile apps" plan, whereby anyone with Joomla or WordPress can get noticed on the mobile web for free!  Just go to WeeverApps.com and sign up for your free HTML5 web-app!

While building Weever we came across an incredible project called The MobileESP Project, by Anthony Hand. The project provided an easy to use code library that we used to build a quick and easy device-detection plugin for Joomla. We're surprised no one has released a version of this for Joomla yet, and are excited to be the first to publicly release a plugin featuring it.

We've created a page for MobileESP for Joomla on WeeverApps.com -- click here to download it and read documentation.

Joomla 1.6 (and now, 1.7) has advanced Joomla's codebase leaps and bounds beyond Joomla 1.5. However, for extension developers, supporting both at the same time can be difficult as keeping completely seperate codebases is sometimes necessarily to take advantage of new features. Developers are left with tough choices about which to support, and how to keep the codebase simple so that they can reach the broadest audience and not cause undue stress on either those adopting newer versions of Joomla, or those maintaining their older sites.

With Weever Apps we have the same issue, and are sharing a solution for bringing at least one feature from 1.6 back to 1.5: language support for Javascript.

As web designers, we quickly recognized that our green business and community not-for-profit clients had no way to affordably participate on the mobile web. So we took a walk. We spent two days hiking on the Bruce Trail (near Tobermory, Ontario) talking about the future of the web. We wanted to make the mobile web more affordable, accessible, and democratic.

Now Weever Apps is here! The basic version is only $30 per year now free and we want your help to get the word out.  Plese share our story on Twitter and beyond!

Details on Weever below - Thanks! - Andrew and Rob

CartaNova Web Design & Marketing is a full-service digital marketing studio that exclusively serves a green business, renewable energy and community not-for-profit clientele. We also provide wind-power web hosting.  We’re happy to have some great clients and a good reputation in our industry. We’re now looking for someone to help us serve even more good initiatives.

Learn more about us in this Hamilton Spectator newspaper article.

Editor's Note:  This post was *bumped* up again in our blog on March 25th due to high interest!

This is big! I'm very excited to introduce Weever, our new service that creates a mobile version of any Joomla! or Wordpress web site in minutes.

Sometimes a little kernel of truth cuts through the marketing.. I was reading Slashdot tonight and noticed an advert for Canada: Get Your Business Online, a 'free web site' promotion by Google, Rogers and a number of other large media and internet corporations here in Canada.

..and I had a nice laugh when I clicked on 'Success Stories' and got a blank 500 error page (pictured above, slightly altered).  True enough.

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:

I wrote the post below titled "Keeping it Simple (and Smart) for Solar Hot Water" for our blog at Renewable Energy World but I thought I'd share it here as well.  In almost every industry (web design, especially) there is desire for simple, efficient solutions to common problems.

Magento eCommerce is wonderful, powerful software that includes a download manager for installing Magento Extensions (add-ons) directly from their Magento Connect service.

However, auto-installation may not always be available or be the best option (for example, the download manager may not work with a site-duplicate testing area or on a local server).  Here's how to manually install a Magento extension.