We used to have to test website changes for Internet Explorer 6 because many businesses continued to use it, believing that it was safer to stay several versions behind the current version of Internet Explorer. However, Internet Explorer 6 used non-standard conventions and had numerous security holes, creating serious risk for its users.

Many businesses express hesitation when it comes to upgrading to the latest version of a software. The decision to use newer versions must be taken on a case-by-case basis, as sometimes refusing to use the newer versions causes problems and other times it's in the best interest of the site owner. For the past year and a half, businesses have had a similar choice with Joomla, specifically choosing between Joomla 2.5 and 3. So which should you choose?

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!