It has come to my attention that someone in India is making a copy of my official site at http://fix.myJoomla.com, and the secure form that you use to enter all your site logins to commission me to do work for you, in order to scam and phish your details.

The user doing this is on IP Address 202.91.80.196 in New Dehli in India- The stupid idiot had forgotten to remove our live chat code and so triggered a chat, from which we can get lots of information about him.

As you can see from this page history he is cloning our pages locally at the moment.

Always check you are on my official pages before sending sensitive information.

There is no way he can clone our Green Bar EV SSL certificate though – Please make sure that before you enter ANY data into our secure forms that you check our certificate.

Our business name of Blue Flame IT Ltd should be in Green in your URL Bar and if you click can verify our SSL Certificate:

I will soon deliberately change the design and look of our secure pages in an effort to make it different and very clearly different to the phishing site.

Always check the FULL url.   The following link is the ONLY official URL that I ask for site login details:

 - https://secure.myjoomla.com/contact/siteform

At NO OTHER URL enter any sensitive information.

I’ll come up with a brand new way to collect your information securely in the very near future – but until then, be warned that this Indian is designing a phishing site just like mine!

IF IN DOUBT DO NOT ENTER ANY INFORMATION AND EMAIL ME AT phil@phil-taylor.com for reassurance first.

I’m very happy to announce that the next best thing for Joomla has just been released!

After almost 5 years of planning, writing, rewriting and testing I’m pleased to reveal our Joomla Security Auditing service open!

Start your free audit now! – No payment needed!

I have been fixing hacked Joomla sites every day for many years now. I’ve seen it all, nothing is new, and everything is fixable – so “Don’t Panic!”

The tools you find here are the very tools I use myself when I’m debugging and fixing a hacked Joomla site or when I just want to know what state a current Joomla site is in. They are the result of years of Joomla experience, backed by a rock solid personal promise from myself.

It all starts with a full audit, that gathers information about your site. This then allows you to look under the hood of a hacked website, identify core files that have been modified, locate hackers backdoors, shells, remote code and other “bad” things with a simple control panel interface.

You can add unlimited Joomla sites to your control panel and audit them instantly on demand – we even give you your first audit for free!

Anyway, go and claim your free audit, and put the tools to the test!

Check out http://www.joomla-security.com Now!

We have mentioned a lot recently about something we have been working on for many years – well next month sees the first ever release of this new unique service.

Be sure to be following us on twitter @securejoomla for updates

You can also watch the countdown live, and maybe see some sneak previews at http://www.joomla-security.com/

Please note: I’ll be on holiday with my young daughter (Who I hardly see!) from Friday 26th October to Saturday 4rd November 2012 – during this time I will only have a little internet time per day and over a slow connection and will only be dealing with emergencies as I see fit (What you think is an emergency might not be what I think is one – Please bear that in mind

JOOMLA 2.5 IS THE RECOMMENDED VERSION FOR MOST SITES – Yes, still!

For most people, we recommend that you update from Joomla 2.5 only when Joomla 3.5 is released around September next year.

If you are an early adopter, developer or more experienced user, then we think you’ll love Joomla 3 right now.

Next year, after more real-world testing, we think everyone will love Joomla 3. At that time, Joomla 3.5 will be available as a one-click update option from your administrator area.

Joomla 2.5 is currently the recommended version for existing sites and will remain so until the release of 3.5.

Read Official FAQ

So today Joomla 3.0 was released. Joomla 3.0 is a short term support version and is part of the transition to Joomla 3.5 – Please read the full explanation here:

JOOMLA 2.5 IS THE RECOMMENDED VERSION FOR MOST SITES

We will be releasing a bfForms for Joomla 3.0 soon, sometime soon, please do not keep asking, it will be tested and released as soon as we can, asking us all the time will just slow things down

bfForms for Joomla 2.5.x will not work on Joomla 3.0.0 – considerable code changes (and style changes) are being made under the hood. If you chose to use Joomla 3.0.0 then you need bfForms for Joomla 3.0.x

Against all advice, we will be allowing customers who have purchased bfForms for Joomla 2.5.x a FREE downloadable copy of bfForms for Joomla 3.0.0 from their myJoomla.com account as soon as its released – so no new purchase is needed – however if you want to encourage development, and to enable us to have an income to support you on your new platform, then just make another payment

Today I wanted to replace some old PHP 4 code I had to calculate the difference in time between two time stamps and return something like “5 days, 2 hours, 4 mins, 45 seconds”

It seems from googling around there are many different attempts to do this – and most of them work quite well, but the majority have huge bugs in their logic.

Looking within PHP 5.3.x we have a very very neat solution, a few lines of code instead of a whole function

Here it is – easy as pie!

$time_one = new DateTime( $YourFirstTime );
$time_two = new DateTime( $YourSecondTime );
$difference = $time_one->diff( $time_two );
echo $difference->format('%h hours %i minutes %s seconds');
// gives something like "4 hours 5 minutes 2 seconds"
// (depending on the input of course!)

Loving PHP 5.3

18th July – 31 August 2012 (Approx)

Just a short note to let you all know that from NOW until the end of August 2012 I’ll only be working part time (well probably “quarter time”) due to my involvement with the RNLI Lifeboat here in Weymouth for the 2012 Olympics.  I’ll be working 12 hour shifts at sea on the Lifeboats, and trying to fit sleep and emergency PHP/Joomla work around these commitments – I’ll still be fixing hacked sites as a priority and conducting security audits during this time.

Please bear with me during this time, after August 2012 we have a huge exciting announcement to make!

Here is a video to give you a taste of the action:

We have just released bfForms v0.6.3. This is a version for Joomla 2.5.4 only.

This release addresses some small niggles that we had with Joomla 2.5.4compatibility as well as changing the access controls on forms, fields and actions.  This is an important step change to putting in full ACL to bfForms in a future version.

In the past there were three access levels, public, registered and special.  Now in bfforms we have Public Visitors and Logged In Users Only.

The full changelog is:

# Fix undefined on amselect
# Fix Zend conflict with Jomsocial
# Fix DNS Mail lookup on PHP 5.3.0+ and Windows
^ Change to allow K2 form embedding, fixes an issue with fireing plugins in content
^ BIG CONCEPT CHANGE: No longer supports "Special" access level, only Public Visitors and Logged in Users.
See Blog post at http://www.phil-taylor.com/blog/

Ok so this week I have been getting a lot of emails asking how to move forms from Joomla 1.5 to Joomal 2.5.x.  Lets be clear first that there is no such thing as an upgrade from Joomla 1.5.x to Joomla 2.5.x and you can expect that you will have to do a  lot of work on your new Joomla 2.5.x site to get it in a position you are happy with again.

The key with bfForms is that we have not made any schema changes to our database tables we use for forms and so the same tables will work in any version of Joomla.

So the key steps you need to take are:

Assumptions:

• We assume you now have Joomla 1.5 with bfForms installed, and a fresh Joomla 2.5.x site without bfForms installed
• We assume because you are undertaking this process then you have a certain level of expertise with php/sites/mysql
• For this demo I will use j15_ and j25_ as example database table prefixes

1. Backup your Joomla 1.5.x database.  Backup your Joomla 2.5.x database.
2. Identify your database prefixes for both Joomla versions.
3. Using phpMyAdmin identify in your Joomla 1.5.x database the tables that start with:
   j15_form_*
4. Export ONLY these tables as SQL using phpMyAdmin export feature
5. Import this SQL into your Joomla 2.5.x database
6. in you Joomla 2.5.x database, change the prefix of these imported tables to match your new prefix (j25_ for this example)
7. Obtain “bfForms for Joomla 2.5″ from your myJoomla.com account.
8. Make a new payment for this to us to help us support you now and in the future (Optional)
9. Install bfForms for Joomla 2.5 into your Joomla 2.5 site as per normal.
10. After installing bfFramework and xajax you should see your forms list intact.

No data is lost in this process at all. However if your form relies on file uploads then you will need to manually migrate the uploaded files and possibly change the path in the file upload element to where to store new uploaded files in Joomla 2.5.

Also you might want to now go and check your Joomla Global Configuration and ensure that you mail settings are set up right, remembering that bfForms will only use the settings you give it and so if emails are no longer set then you need to fix that.

If the above is beyond your skill level, or you just wish us to do it for you then we can, but we will charge you for our consultancy time at GBP50.00 per incident.  Please click the button below to find out more.

Get help moving bfForms →