Category Archives: Joomla

Clean up your tmp folder with Cache Cleaner

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Spring is in the air. Great weather, plants and flowers that are blossoming… and people have the inexplicable need to do a “Spring Clean-up”.

Cleaning up your websites is something you should do, too. And not just for spring. Did you know that your /tmp folder is a haven for megabytes of files that you’ll never use again? This folder is used to temporary store files when installing extensions – and updates of these extensions.

Anything in this folder can be safely deleted – but you can’t delete the folder. There’s two ways to approach this: The wrong way and the right way.

  • The Wrong Way: Delete the content of the folder manually. Possibly the worst method to do this is by FTP.
  • The Right Way: Use “Cache Cleaner” by Nonumber

Don’t let the name “Cache Cleaner” fool you. The free version of Nonumber also cleans up the tmp folder for you. All you have to do is click the button in the top right corner of your site (Up until Joomla! 2.5) or the bottom left corner.

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Clearing the tmp folder with Cache Cleaner only takes two clicks.

You can download or buy Cache Cleaner here. The Professional version offers you a bunch of other interesting features, such as: automatically cleaning your cache by interval, emptying folders that you define yourself, or even emptying specific database tables. For only €10 a year, this is a tool you should consider adding to your toolbox.

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Joomla! on Stackexchange? With your help, it’s possible.

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If you like both Joomla! and Stackexchange you might have noticed that Joomla! doesn’t have it’s own hub.

A proposal has now been made to create a Joomla! hub (following our colleagues of Drupal and WordPress), but it needs “commits” before it becomes reality.

So if you are both a Stackexchanges and a Joomla! User, you’ll probably want to take a minute of your time to make this happen.

It still needs a ton of votes, so any “commit” counts. What are you still waiting for?

Simply head over to the proposal page and click that “Commit” button. You know you want to.

Use Akeeba Extract Wizard under Mountain Lion

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One of the new features in Mac OSX Mountain Lion is “Gatekeeper”, the not-so-friendly tool that tries to “keep you safe” from using evil, evil applications. While the idea is great in general, sometimes you’ll want to use an application that you didn’t buy in the Mac store, or which isn’t developed by a “Trusted Developer”.

In that case, Gatekeeper will refuse to open the program for you unless you lower it’s security settings. This prevented me from using Akeeba Extract Wizard, which is vital to unarchive your back-ups made with Akeeba Backup.

Here’s how you get to use Akeeba Extract Wizard (and by extension, almost any other application):

The steps

Use Akeeba Extract on Mountain Lion

  1. Open Finder, and go to the Applications Folder.
  2. Right-click or Ctrl-click on Akeeba Extract Wizard.
  3. Click “Open”.
  4. Gatekeeper will ask you if you’re sure that you want to open the application. Confirm that’s the case.
  5. Akeeba Extract Wizard will now be started. In the future, you can now also start it from the Application dock or the “Applications” quick folder on your dock.

Add your own css file to a Gantry Powered template

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Recently, Rockettheme’s Gantry framework made the transition from using CSS to LESS. If you occasionally dabble in CSS, like me, you might be lost at first. You want to add your own CSS, but where do you put it?

Personally I think adding a custom CSS file has become simpler for Ganty based templates. If you follow the simple steps below you can easily add your own CSS file.

Locate the LESS folder

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  • Go to the “Templates” folder and open the folder for your Gantry powered Template.
  • Next, find the “less” folder; and open it.

Create a .less file

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Create a file in the less folder, and name it myfilename.less . Myfilename can be anything you want; just make sure to use the .less extension

In your .less file, write the CSS you want to write. Plain old CSS will suffice, but of course you can also use LESS gems like variables and mixens to spice things up.

Open and edit global.less

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Edit the file “global.less” and edit it. Adding the following rule will make Gantry include your CSS when compiling the CSS files:

@import “myfilename.less”;

Finally, save the file and reupload it. When you visit the page and clear the cache, you’ll see that your CSS is included. Victory!

Configure AdminTools’ .htaccess on Cloudaccess

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If your website is hosted on Cloudaccess.net, pay attention when using the AdminTools .htaccess maker.

When configuring your settings, make sure to disable the first option “Disable directory listings (recommended).

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If you fail to disable this option, you’ll get a “500” error. The reason? Cloudaccess is already disabling Directory Listings on their servers.

Why does it say recommended then ?

Many hosting companies which don’t care about your security, have Directory Listings enabled by default. This allows hackers to see the contents of your directories, potentially allowing them to determine if you have outdated software and attack your site. This option is a “must” in order to prevent such abuse of the Directory Listings feature of Apache. Good quality hosts, like CloudAccess.net, have Directory Listings disabled globally and don’t allow their users to change this setting via their .htaccess file. This is why it throws a 500 error on those good quality hosts. Ideally, everybody should use a good quality host and this options could be removed from Admin Tools. Unfortunately, the majority of people use the sort of hosting that makes having this option in Admin Tools necessary.

The above explanation is courtesy of Nicholas Dionysopoulos, Lead Developer of AkeebaBackup.com

What other options should I disable?

None. They’ll all work as designed.

Disclaimer: Both Joomlareporter and ToralkoDocs are hosted on the lightning fast servers of Cloudaccess.