All in one week, the Joomla Open Source Content Management System has, in in the awe inspiring hype enabled words of its developer team, “pimped its ride“, “shifted Forge’s Gears“, and marked a “defining moment in the Joomlasphere”.
Today marks a defining moment in the Joomlasphere, which sees the launch of our gForge. Yes, the new ‘V8 hot rod’ has arrived — and we believe it will provide the best development environment for a number of reasons but primarily to future-proof and cope with huge load.
All giggling aside, I’m very pleased by these developments. Joomla is not messing around, and I am hopeful that this effort to future proof their forge (where Joomla software and extensions live) means the much anticipated public release of Joomla version 1.5 is nigh. The Kabissa website is built using Joomla 1.0 and we actively promote it to our African civil society members, and 1.5 promises to be even more powerful and userfriendly. I know we are eagerly awaiting 1.5 because it has been more than two years now since we adoped Mambo, which became Joomla, and there has been no major new release in all that time.
This may be old hat to many, but I always have to go searching for reminders of how to do stuff like this. When I set up a new Joomla site I find it useful to put it behind a password while it is still a “work in progress”. Today while Googling “apache .htaccess” I found alot of very confusing guides and password generators - but at the end of the day it was the elated.com article How-To: Password protecting your pages with htaccess that saved me.
The elated.com instructions worked well for me because I have command line (SSH) access to my server - most people will be looking for a control panel feature for password protection. Usually on the Kabissa server I would use the Plesk control panel for this. The SSH instructions at elated.com took me about 15 seconds:
- navigate to httpdocs dir (or whatever dir will be password protected)
- htpasswd -c .htpasswd admin (then type in password when prompted, and repeat)
- copy htaccess contents from elate.com article to clip board:
AuthUserFile /full/path/to/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName “My Secret Folder”
Require valid-user
- create .htaccess file and paste in contents (correcting AuthUserFile location)
- Test in browser.
The Plesk control panel is more user friendly but even with a good Internet connection it takes at least several minutes to log in via a web interface, browse to the domain, click on the “directory” icon and type in the username and password to create the password protection.
Recent Comments