What a day!

Today, I sat the Zend PHP5 Certified Engineer Certification exam AND PASSED!

This is my first PHP industry qualification (I don’t think there are many PHP certifications apart from the Zend ones!) and now makes me the ONLY Zend PHP5 Certified Engineer in Jersey, Channel Islands, UK!

What does this mean for you? Well it is a certification that puts me apart from other developers and shows the level and commitment I have taken in learning PHP 5 and in applying that knowledge in real word situations. As far as I know, no other Joomla Extension Developer has obtained this grade. (I may be wrong!)

More details about the Zend PHP5 Certified Engineer Certification can be found on the Zend.com website.

Although my name has not yet been added to their yellow pages, you can authenticate my certification by clicking here (Pearson Vue) and entering:

• Registration Number 225168069
• Validation Number 1329096747

I just want to acknowledge someone here.  Andrew Eddie!, the original lead developer on an old project called Mambo - without him, his encouragement, his example, his code, I would never have got into PHP and would never be where I am today.  Thank you Andrew - Bitwise Operators (aka Masks in Mambo 4.5)  are part of the Exam!!!!!

We are taking a bold step to start to release PHP5 Only compatible products.

(A bold step the Joomla Developers have not yet taken, but many other open source projects have).

From the next releases of Joomla Tags and Joomla Knowledgebase we are setting the minimum requirements for PHP to PHP5.2.0+ - this will allow us to code in a much more efficient and expandable way, and also to take advantage of other PHP5 libs and services.

PHP5 is mature and has been around for over 4 years, its about time every hosting company upgraded!

Further details on the goPHP5 campaign can be read here

We will make further announcements when we have more detail, and when we release our framework with PHP5 specific code in it, until then we invite your feedback

Are you running PHP4???/ Let us know - quickly!

We are getting a lot of requests for information on mosDirectory’s future, in particular compatibility with Joomla 1.5.x

At the time of writing we have no intention of ever making mosDirectory compatible with Joomla 1.5.x

Earlier last month we started a completly new component, that is a directory type of component, with a whole host of new features and new code. Nothing from mosDirectory will be used in this component.

We do not know if/when this new component (compatible with Joomla 1.5.x) will be released, and please do not email us asking - (just assume its not soon and you will not be disapoointed if you are right).  We will release it when it is ready.

Just a small note to let you know we have released the long awaited update to Joomla Tags.  This update fixes all known and reported issues with Joomla Tags and fixes some core issues in Joomla 1.5.x that were broke following changes to the Joomla 1.5.x codebase.

This version is compatible with Joomla 1.0.15 and Joomla 1.5

Hi all.

Right now I am sat in a hotel near Stanstead Airport, the wife and baby are both asleep so Im taking two mins to update my blog.

We are on our way to Venice, for our first family holiday since Lela was born, our first real international holiday for almost 4 years.

You can still purchase from our website, our fulfillment process is 100% automated and you should receive all the emails/access required at myJoomla.com after purchase. This process means you can instantly access your purchased downloads after paypal payment.

If you have any problems please ocntact me using the contact form and Ill do my best to reply as soon as possible - but do not expect a reply until Wednesday next week at the earliest (then if I manage to get more time online when the wife and baby are alseep you will be excited to see my replyas you will not be expecting it ;-))

Thanks to all those that have given me and my family great support over the last few months - you know who you are and you deserve a mention, that includes customers who repeatedly return for our products and services and those that provide support by other methods.

We hope to have a great time in Venice, and return refreshed to release new features for Joomla Tags and new features for Joomla Knowledgebase - and finally release Joomla Forms to provide form generation in Joomla 1.5 native !!! and exciting summer!

We also have 2 very exciting projects we will revel soon - no one has heard of these yet - but they will excite you (and will have a easy to understand name without a oo in it!!) Watch this space!!!

Well back to the holiday….

Phil.

The Joomla Core team have today released Joomla 1.5.1 to specifically address a security issue,

The official announcement was:

The Joomla! community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla! 1.5.1 [Seenu].  Since the stable release of Joomla! 1.5 we have seen huge numbers of downloads which has helped to push the total number of downloads to over 3 million in less than a year.

We have found in one of the new features of Joomla! 1.5, an XML-RPC Blogger API plugin, a high priority security vulnerability.  While this feature is disabled by default on every Joomla! 1.5 install and would have to be manually enabled for the vulnerability to exist, we strongly recommend that all Joomla! 1.5 users upgrade to Joomla! 1.5.1.

Thanks to the work done by both the Joomla! Bug Squad as well as the Development Team , not only has this vulnerability been patched but so have several other smaller issues.

The core developers of Joomla! have just released a statement about a security exploit in Joomla 1.5.0

After releasing Joomla! 1.5 stable we have discovered a high priority security issue.

The vulnerability has been discovered in XML-RPC in combination with the blogger API.

There is a security problem in this code that makes it possible to alter the articles

on your site (including removal). This problems has been fixed currently by members

of the development team and the Joomla! bug squad, solution is now available from

Subversion. So what do you need to do until we release Joomla! 1.5.1?
All Joomla! users who have enabled the XML-RPC Blogger API plugin should disable it!

If you have never enabled this plugin you do not need to do anything.

This comes hot on the tail of an xml-rpc issue in wordpress also !

In our ecitement to get v2.5.0 out the door we made a small mistake - Opps - which meant mosDirectory users were left secure from the recent exploit, but unable to edit listings

We have quickly fixed this and now the download of mosDirectory available at myJoomla.com is now v2.5.1 (The only file changes is admin.directory.php, oh and the  version number in directory.xml)

The Bad News:
It has come to our attention overnight that an exploit for earlier versions of mosDirectory has been published on the internet. We have tested this exploit and can confirm that all versions of mosDirectory are affected.

We have personally emailed all customers who have purchased mosDirectory over the last three years.

The Good News:
We have worked hard this morning to secure mosDirectory from this exploit and we have just uploaded and released mosDirectory v2.5.0 which fixes all known problems.

YOU MUST UPGRADE TO mosDirectory v2.5.0 AS SOON AS POSSIBLE - to avoid your site being compromised.

The code of mosDirectory was written several years ago (Three in fact) and since then our experience and security levels have increased significantly in this area. The reported exploit is in code that was written three years ago and has never been identified as a problem before today.

We trust the quickness of our release of mosDirectory v2.5.0 after the confirmation of the exploit assures you of our dedication to your sites security! (Lets see Microsoft patch files within 4 hours of a bug report )

You can download the latest version from https://secure.myjoomla.com

To upgrade, just uninstall the component, and reinstall the new one, no data is lost in the process.

I am receiving a HUGE amount of traffic to my site from people searching google for the com_migrator component that allows (kind of) the migration of content from Joomla 1.0.x sites to Joomla 1.5.0.  We feature high in google results for these queries because we blogged about “what you need to know about Joomla 1.5″ a while ago and the migrator component was mentioned there.

However, the new wiki page on docs.joomla.org has all the details, and the download links, so (after you buy some of our components ) pop on over to:

http://docs.joomla.org/Migrating_from_1.0.x_to_1.5_Stable