Saturday, April 01, 2023

Joomla

Joomla – Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

17 March 2020
Grimey
No comments
Categories: Hosting, Joomla, Malware

I started getting emails several times a day from a customer’s website. The whole message was :

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

Oleg240170@mail.ru
    host mxs.mail.ru [94.100.180.104]
    SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
    550 spam message rejected. Please visit http://help.mail.ru/notspam-support/id?c=4-MIiXod8zc7sHtw55eQjviDdemyJDJvBOiPJah130hjLxCvG-FjARUAAADt5QAA44RPJw~~ or  report details to abuse@corp.mail.ru. Error code:
    8908E3E337F31D7A707BB03B8E9097E7E97583F86F3224B2258FE80448DF75A8AF102F630163E11B. ID:
    000000150000E5ED274F84E3.
Reporting-MTA: dns; se15.mailspamprotection.com

Action: failed
Final-Recipient: rfc822;Oleg240170@mail.ru
Status: 5.0.0
Remote-MTA: dns; mxs.mail.ru
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 spam message rejected. Please visit http://help.mail.ru/notspam-support/id?c=4-MIiXod8zc7sHtw55eQjviDdemyJDJvBOiPJah130hjLxCvG-FjARUAAADt5QAA44RPJw~~ or  report details to abuse@corp.mail.ru. Error code: 8908E3E337F31D7A707BB03B8E9097E7E97583F86F3224B2258FE80448DF75A8AF102F630163E11B. ID: 000000150000E5ED274F84E3.

SubjectAccount Details for Чтоб перестроить жизнь, необходимы познания: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16WCSDEeBboOGGsZoHYaYAKoKVAtD8lmh/view?usp=sharing 📅🎊🔝 at Shockers Smoke Shop
FromShockers Smoke Shop
ToOleg240170@mail.ru
DateMon 21:01

Hello Чтоб перестроить жизнь, необходимы познания:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16WCSDEeBboOGGsZoHYaYAKoKVAtD8lmh/view?usp=sharing

I contacted the hosting company to see if the email portion is being blasted with emails, but it wasn’t. I really didn’t want the customer to be getting these emails. Plus I didn’t want the domain becoming black listed. The hosting was eliminated as an issue.

I solved it by discovering I left the Self Registration on. Russian attackers were trying to Phish the site linking to MalWare on a Google Share. I found about 200 users tried to register, and they were all Russian. Here is what my settings were:

I hope this helps someone else out there….

Chronoform Submits in Test but Not Live

8 January 2020
Grimey
No comments
Categories: Chronoforms, Joomla, Joomla Extension, SEO

I had a working Chronoforms 5 form that I just changed a few dates and suddenly stopped working. I tried debugging the form; however, the form wasn’t submitting to the next page for the debugger to even show me the variables. I found my answer here.

https://www.chronoengine.com/forums/posts/t96579/form-sending-on-test-form-but-not-on-live-site

In the Form go the “Set up” tab. In the “on load” section you will have a “HTML (Render Form)” action. Edit this and toward the bottom you will see “Relative URL“, set this to “No“. It has something to do with SEO options.

I hope this helps someone else out there….

Fabrik Change Required Field Icon

18 December 2019
Grimey
No comments
Categories: Fabrik, Joomla

The default icon for a required field is an eye, and I wanted a red star. It wasn’t hard and this following article got me started.

https://www.chrismendlatech.com/2011/08/changing-the-required-icon-for-fabrik-forms-in-joomla-from-an-envelope-to-a-star/

Start by going into the Element’s properties by going to “Elements” and then double-click on the element you want to add the requirement. This assume you have a validation on element already if not click the Add button to add one. I used the “notempty” plugin. At the bottom you will see a field for “icon”. It pulls from the “/media/com_fabrik/images” folder and I choose one of the .png files that was there, so in the field I just added the text “notempty.png”.

I hope this helps someone else out there.

Joomla 404 Page Reverted Default

4 November 2019
Grimey
No comments
Categories: 404 error, Gantry, Joomla

On a Joomla site running Gantry 5 template I noticed my custom 404 page stopped working. I looked up the process and when I looked at the files on the server I had an custom error page there already; however, the date on the file was in October and I put the custom file up there in March.

I was wondering if I got attacked and my files were changed. I didn’t notice anything other issues, but several files were changed in the g5_hydrogen folder. I then realized that around that time I upgraded my Gantry Template and Hydrogen Theme around October.

My conclusion is if you update the Gantry Hydrogen template, then make sure your custom 404 page is still working. I haven’t tested this in the WordPress version, but I would assume it is the same.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

Joomla Tags and SEO Descriptions

26 July 2019
Grimey
No comments
Categories: Joomla, Tags

One of favorite aspects of using Joomla’s Tag system is the tags show up as separate search items in Google’s index. I noticed one day that the description in the search results isn’t what I would want it to be and wanted to change it. Here is an example of two different tags.

Nice long description that was pulled from the page it eventually links to.
This also links to a page but it doesn’t pull the description. You will also notice this tag is “55” and the other is “bitlocker”.

I was thinking it was because the tag was listed with a number instead of an alias; however, I found the “Bitlocker” tag that was indexed by the number; however, it shows the description I wanted.

This time the numbered tag is pulling the global configuration.

I would love to find a solution for this, so if anyone else knows feel free to comment.

I-Frame In Joomla

31 May 2019
Grimey
No comments
Categories: iFrame, Joomla, Joomla Extension, RSFirewall

Had a customer who deleted an iFrame in a Joomla article. IFrames can be trouble-some in Joomla and the old JCE, but we have JCE Pro installed. I have sometimes switched the editor from JCE to NONE in the Global Configuration. This wasn’t the fix here. When I pasted the IFrame code into the article the iframe tag would be come “<i-frame”.

A Google search on “i-frame” and “Joomla” brought me to a page from RSJoomla. I had to remove some of the JavaScript protection on the post data. You can find this here (Components > RSFirewall! > Firewall Configuration > Active Scanner). It will look like this.

I hit the X so there were no protections other than being on. Here is a link to that article. They offer more suggestions, but only this one worked for me.

https://www.rsjoomla.com/support/documentation/rsfirewall-user-guide/frequently-asked-questions/scrambled-tags-iframe-becomes-i-frame.html?utm_source=readmoredoc&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=rsfirewall-exception

I hope this helps someone else out there…

Moving Joomla Site To New Domain And SSL

16 March 2019
Grimey
No comments
Categories: Godaddy, Hosting, Joomla, SSL, WordPress

Started to rebuild a customers site in Joomla but didn’t want to disturb the existing site we purchased a new CPanel Hosting package which gave us PHP 7. I got the site finished and approved but when I went to make the switch of the domain name to the desired name I noticed a dedicated IP in thehosting package. There were a lot of specific subdomains and uses for the such as a “Mail.mydomain.com”. This turned out to be for a SSL cert that was installed. Here are the steps it took and some of the pitfalls I ran into.

The SSL Certificate needed to be removed. In the “My Products” section of the Godaddy hosting scroll down to the SSL section. Click on “Mange”, but if you have more than one SSL make sure you end up in the correct one. I was ending up in the wrong one to fix it I would click on “All” in the upper left of the screen of the SSL Certificate’s detail page. I could then select the desired certificate and it allow me to “Rekey & Manage”.

Since the two hosting packages and domains were all with Godaddy it was easy to disassociate the SSL form the domain. I clicked on “Change the site that your certificate protects” and added a made up subdomain of “old.mydomain.com”, hit “save”, and then “Submit all Saved Changes”. I repeated this process to add it back to the new hosting package after the desired domain name was attached to the new hosting package with a sweet new site at the end of it.

Clicking the profile siloquette icon in the upper-right of the Godaddy dashboard and go to “My Products”. Select the old hosting to detach the domain name from the old hosting. This was an old package that listed “Hosted Domains” in the left-side menu. I clicked on that name ( I didn’t think was a hyperlink), and it brought me to a list of of a couple of domain names. I needed to wait almost a day for the SSL certificate to be disassociated with the domain. This was unusually long time to wait. It normally takes a few hours. I then clicked the checkbox next to the desired domain name and click “Change Primary”. I gave it a made up name of “old.mydomain.com” and clicked okay. Now to move the desired domain name to the new hosting package.

In Godaddy’s admin panel it seems fastest to use the icon the upper right and go to “my products” and this time select the new hosting package. In this new hosting page you will click on the “Change” button in the Account panel and select the desired domain. The last thing was go back the SSL certificate and change it to protect the desired domain again.

Overall an easy process; however, I run a WordPress blog as a subdomain and of course use perma-stinks. Once the main site was moved over the wordpress site broken in a couple of ways, and it was difficult to log into the admin panel. This was a quick fix by going into the database table “wp-options” and change the “siteurl” and the “home” to the new domain. I had a couple of other Joomla site as subdomains that came back up fine.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

Roksprocket 4 Column Grid In Gantry Hydrogen

17 October 2018
Grimey
No comments
Categories: Gantry, Joomla, Joomla Extension

While working a Joomla! site built with Gantry 5 Hyrdogen template I was having an issue when switching between different column quantities. If I had the columns set to 3 everything was fine; however, when I tried to switch between 3 to 4 columns everything was in one column.

I got around this issue by going into the basic CSS file. This file is located on root/components/com_roksprocket/layouts/grids/themes/basic/basic.css. On line 23 I changed the following:

.sprocket-grids-b-columns-3 > li {width: 33.333333333333336%;width: -webkit-calc(100% / 3);width: calc(100% / 3);}

to 

.sprocket-grids-b-columns-3 > li {width: 33.333333333333336%;width: -webkit-calc(100% / 4);width: calc(100% / 4);}

Once I knew this would work I added the CSS to my custom.css, and set the original “basic.css” back. My override was working fine.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

 

SEO In Joomla 3.X

15 October 2018
Grimey
No comments
Categories: Joomla, SEO

I often start SEO from an existing website. Here are steps I always perform when starting the task.

  1. Start an Excel spreadsheet with 9 columns
    Page/article, Current URL, Current Title,Current Description, New URL, New Title, New Description, and Notes
  2. Then I go to Google and in the search box itself you type:   site:thedomain     Then hit enter.
    This will bring back the pages that Google has indexed. This will be critical to know so can later remove old URLs in Google’s Webmaster Tools, recrawl the site, and be up-to-date. This part can take a while so you have to consider this could double your time spent on the job, so be prepared to bill for it or you will be sorry.
  3. In Joomla you will need to set up the URL to be Search Engine Friendly. In the Administrator area go to Global Configuration >> Site >> Search Engine Friendly URLs ( turn this on), Use URL Rewriting ( turn this on). These changes will require you to change your htaccess.txt and change it to .htaccess. I don’t have it set to “yes” in my  image below, but turning on “Add Suffix to URL” will give the page the “.html” at the end.
  4. I prefer to do a lot of the rest in the menu item. The “Browser Page Title” and the “Alias” is where item #2 from the above image will show.
  5. Staying in the Menu item I move over to the “Metadata” section to add my “Description”. This is part #3 in the upper image.
  6. Here I would rework my Excel spread sheet my making sure my new titles are less than “54” characters long and the description is less that 134 characters long. The name of the page should include the service or search term you want to use for that page. I use Wordcounter.net to determine how many characters I have in my new titles and descriptions.
  7. Next go into Google Webmaster Tools and remove the old URL’s that you won’t need anymore. Click the “Temporary Hide” button, put in the URL, and Google will do the rest.
  8. I don’t always add Sitemaps, but here is where you can do this in Google’s Webmaster Tools.

I meet with NOVA JUG recently and the presenter Dorothy had a bunch to offer. Some of the plug-ins she mentioned.

She also really talked up this book by Simon.

This site for analysis of a website. https://en.ryte.com/

For a security update the group discussed changing a setting to not send the password to a user in plain text.

https://www.joomlashack.com/blog/joomla/passwords-emails/

I hope this helps someone else out there…