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Securing your Admin account in Joomla!

On June 22, 2009, in Joomla!, by Rob

By default, the Super-Administrator in Joomla is named Administrator, and the user record is #62.  This gives any hacker an easy starting point to attack your site.

One of your first steps after installing Joomla! should be to fix this;

  • Go into the Users module and create a new account called anything but Admin or Administrator (Chief, TopDog, whatever works for you.)
  • Assign that user account Super-Administrator rights.
  • Log in with the new Super-Administrator account. Now log out and in again with the new account to confirm that it works.
  • Again in User Manager;
    • Demote the original Administrator account to Public Front-end|Registered under Groups.
    • Change Block User to Yes.

By changing the name and id# of your most powerful account, you've now rendered the original administrator account harmless and closed that avenue of attack for a hacker.

 

Hiding Menu Titles in Joomla!

On June 22, 2009, in Joomla!, by Rob

Joomla! Menus by default show their titles.  Normally this is not a desireable behaviour, particularly when there is only one menu and the "Main Menu" title is rather pointless.

To hide the menu title, go into Module Manager, click the name of your menu under the Module Name column, then in the Details section click No for Show Title.

 

Adding a Foreign key on a MySQL Table

On June 13, 2009, in MySQL, by Rob

I recently had trouble adding a foreign key on a MySQL database.

ERROR 1005 (HY000): Can't create table '.\test\b.frm' (errno: 150)

After much searching I discovered that the problem was that the columnbeing references needed to be indexed.
So then adding a foreign key, make sure;

  • it is an  InnoDB table
  • reference column may need to be identical in both tables.
  • column being referenced is indexed. (The error message is not clear on this at all.)