After struggling for years to set up menu items shown only for guest visitors in various Joomla/Mambo versions prior Joomla 1.7, was a real relief to have an easy and foolproof way to do it. No hacks needed, no scripts to add, no configuration trickery... you simply selected from the Access Level dialog the Guest access group for anything qualifying for this settings (modules for example, but not only..) and you where set! And if you upgraded your site from Joomla 1.7 to Joomla 2.5 the feature where still there. Recently I had a big surprise, I needed the feature in a brand new Joomla 2.5 site... and don't found it!!

Since the release of Joomla 2.5 there has been a particularly annoying “duplicate template” bug that becomes clearly evident when you install or update a template. This has caused a great deal of confusion and consternation among Joomla users, but nobody offered an easy to use fix until recently. As anyone else in this business I hit the wall with this bug, until I found a cure for it on RocketTheme's blog.

This is a key security issue, but unfortunately many of the Joomla site-owners need guidance on this.

First, let's see what you should know:

Joomla is a typical LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) application, even if runs on many other platforms too. The entire access rights "philosophy" is relying on the native environment's settings.

By default Joomla 2.5 does not add the robots meta tag in the header and you have no handy tool by default to do it in one place, unless you don't use some add-on which let you do this easily.

But what if you prefer to do it yourself, bare-handed, without seeing even some code? You might be surprised, but in fact in Joomla 2.5 it's very easy to set up meta tag robots for your home page and content articles.

After I upgraded this site to Joomla 1.7 I wondering, how I can create a RSS feed with all entries to re-create the original functionality we had in the initial site. The problem is that Joomla 1.7 use for this purpose the "Syndication Feeds" module, which picks up the Featured Articles menu item (if any) to create a RSS feed from the currently displayed page.... This works fine - relatively - if you use the default Joomla setup, the Featured Articles menu item being your default homepage. But this isn't my case - and this isn't anymore the case of most of the sites... so I needed to find out something else.

Why you should do that? Humm, there are arguments why yo should get rid off or keep it, but it's a matter of personal choice, mainly. The methods to removing the meta name generator tag for Joomla varies between versions. I discussed couple of ways to do it  in an earlier tip. Here is a new one, working in Joomla 2.5!

This seems to be an ever returning question in Joomla world, you might already read the first part of the sequel: How to reuse Joomla 1.0 templates?. So, let's go one step further, and let's see how we can easily reuse those nice Joomla 1.5 templates in the post-Joomla 1.7 world (more specifically under Joomla 2.5). Don't expect a fully covering guide on how to convert Joomla 1.5 template to Joomla 2.5 template, but instead a detailed description on what I usually do - less theory, more practical knowledge.

As I write this, both Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 have reached their EOL (End Of Life) for long time, and are not developed or supported anymore. This is a huge security risk, so the best advice here is to upgrade your Joomla site to the latest version. But what if you don't have the time/funds to do it right now?

Being disabled by default, this very powerful new core component shipped with Joomla 2.5 remains unnoticed by many Joomla site owners. It's time to began to use it and unleash the power hidden here.