Macrotone Blogs

Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.

Hints and Tips on Joomla and its usage.

Site Spam Protection

We have noticed for some time a steady stream of Spam Comments added to our Blog entries and articles.  We know that we are not alone in this and that it seems to be a ‘fact of life’ that certain individuals wish to waste their time in creating such trivia. 

To minimise the disruption and annoyance these cause, these have been kept under control using a variety of methods and we recently changed our Blogging tool as a step to minimising this problem.

However one thing we did notice was that there were still Spam comments being entered even for content items that were no longer visible on the site.

We are sure that the majority of our visitors are not that interested in goods that these Spam entries advertise so have decided to take another step to trap more of these entries and introduce a further step in our line of defences.

Akeeba Admin Tools Pro has a very useful tool in the ‘Web Access Filter’ that can be used to assist in this task.  [We are users of this product and recommend it to our users, as satisfied customers and for the excellent support provided.]

We hope that this will not create any problems to our visitors and will continue to monitor the situation as time goes by. 

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Problems writing a sh404sef installable plugin - resolved

I have been having problems getting a sh404sef installable plug-in working on Joomla 2.5.  Looking around the web, it seems that there do not appear to be any at all.  Of the sh404sef plug-ins available they nearly all require that the code is placed in a sef_ext directory under the component, OR placed in the sef_ext directory under the sh404sef component on the site (along with the supplied components).   This is not quite the same as having a separate installable plugin component.

 

The Anything Digital website has an article explaining how to write one, but no matter what I tried it would not work.  They helpfully provide a 'Developer' support forum, so I raised a question.  Not very helpfully they closed it with an instruction to raise the question in another forum.  A complete waste of time.  Reading around on the web, it seems I am not the only person to experience this type of response.

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Session Fixation Protection

Came across an interesting article on Session Fixation Protection [requires registration].  In essence a session fixation is a vulnerability caused by incorrectly handling user sessions in a Web application. A user’s session is usually tracked by a cookie, which is assigned when the user visits the page with the Web application for the first time. The problem occurs when this cookie does not change for the duration of the browsing session; users authenticate and log out, but their session cookie remains the same. This is often the default behaviour of an application.

Whilst understanding the problem, I tend to wonder just how much of a problem it actually is in real life.

The only solution is correct coding of the Web application, always assigning a new cookie immediately after a user has authenticated on a site.

Joomla PHP White Page Error

Whilst developing Joomla extensions I sometimes get a White Page error.  I discovered this interesting post by Phil Taylor that I have edited and reproduced below.

Sometimes, due to a PHP error, a Joomla Extension can stop working and, without displaying an error, leading you to a blank page.

 

In that case, to find out why, perform the following actions:

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PHP calling MySQL functions and procedures

Following on from a recent post on creating MySQL functions and procedures from PHP, the next logical step is to make use of the functions and procedures.

To call a MySQL procedure using the Joomla database classes you make use of a CALL statement.

  $query = 'CALL #__dbprocedure (' . $userId . ',"' . $date . '","' . $ndate . '","' . $datap . '",' . $npwds . ')';
  $db->setQuery($query);
  $retn= $db->query();   // Returns false if query fails to execute

 

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Using PHP to create MySQL database procedures

There was a requirement to create MySQL database procedures and functions for a future feature of the Password Control plugin component.   Much time and effort was put into finding a solution that would work.  Extensive searching of the available documentation and internet resources didn't really help hence this blog.

Extensive attempts using the SQL update files and the manifest file failed to produce a result.  In the end a solution was found using the manifest installation script file and writting PHP code.

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