Using Joomla

Appendix D. Tips and Tricks

Over the years, we have learned a lot about Joomla—its power, its limitations, and most of all, its quirks. We will share some of those quirks in this appendix. Some quirks are actually cool tricks if you learn to use them.

How to Tell if a Website Is Running Joomla

There are several things you can do to see if a website is running Joomla. Unfortunately, some people will try to obscure certain things to make some of the methods mentioned not work, so we’ll share some of those tricks as well.

generator meta tag

The easiest method is to view the website’s source code. If you see the following line, you can be sure that you are looking at a Joomla website:

<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management" />

Note

To prevent your website from showing the contents of the generator meta tag, add the following to your template’s index.php file on the line after the check to see if _JEXEC is defined:

$this->setGenerator();

This will not completely remove the generator meta tag, but it will remove Joomla! 1.5-Open Source Content Management from displaying. We cannot completely remove the tag without a hack since the shell of this meta tag is hardcoded in the framework.

/administrator

It’s too easy, right? Just like you type /administrator at the end of your domain name URL in order to access the Administrator Backend, so do all other Joomla users.

If you see a Joomla Administrator login screen, you can confirm it’s a Joomla website.

Note

Unfortunately, ...