Recently, I helped an associate with a Wordpress shopping cart. They were running into problems because of how the developers had coded the plugin. On the front end it looked fine, but it was so oddly designed on the backend that they couldn't manage it.

Unfortunately, many site owners run into similar problems.

They choose an extension because they are impressed by the way that it looks, but once it is installed, the interface is so complicated that they find themselves unable to make it work for them. That’s not a big deal if you plan to have an outside development company manage your site. But for many businesses, that isn’t a reasonable option.

When developing or choosing a Joomla extension, its appearance is only half of the picture. The other half – and arguably the more important – is the end user.

A question I’m commonly asked is why I prefer Joomla! over the other open source CMS applications, specifically the other big popular applications Drupal and WordPress. People don't understand the differences between the three and jump at the opportunity to ask a domain expert like me what those differences are. Most of the blog posts that I've seen comparing them do Goldilocks comparisons where they fall along a gradient: easy and simple (WordPress), medium and medium (Joomla!), and technical and hard (Drupal). This is easy for people to understand, but it's not accurate and it's a simplification which isn't helpful. In this post, I'm not going to do a rich analysis of the differences between the three, but rather show you why this comparison isn't helpful and suggest an alternate course of analysis.

Halloween is upon us and I wanted to share a scary story from my experiences as a Joomla! developer. I was thinking of all the frightening things that happen to clients of Blue Bridge Development and I realize that in the past year there's been a recurring theme: hacked sites. Around once every two months we've been approached to recover a hacked Joomla! site. To sanitize the environment and ensure that no corrupted files or data exist on the recovered site is quite a bit of work and cost the figurative pound of flesh. That idiom, a pound of flesh, originates from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and signifies a high price that absolutely must be paid. Shakespeare is great, but for practical advice I'm a big fan of my hero Ben Franklin who said, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." So in this post I'm going to share some simple ways that will dramatically increase your site's security and help prevent you from ever having to pay a pound of your own flesh. Some of the advice will apply to anyone owning a website and some of it will be specific to Joomla!