Book Image

Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development

By : James Kennard
Book Image

Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development

By: James Kennard

Overview of this book

<p><br />Joomla! is the world's hottest open-source content management system, and the winner of the 2006 Open Source CMS Prize. Out of the box, Joomla! does a great job of managing the content needed to make your website sing. But for many people, the true power of Joomla! lies in its application framework that makes it possible for thousands of developers around the world to create powerful add-ons and extensions. Many companies or organizations have requirements that go beyond what is available in the basic Joomla! package or in a freely available extension. Thankfully, Joomla! offers a powerful application framework that makes it easy for developers to create sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla! into virtually unlimited directions.<br /><br />If you use PHP programming to extend or customize Joomla!, this book is essential reading. If you feel that you've mastered the basics of creating Joomla! extensions, then this book will take you to the next level. Packed with expert advice on all aspects of development with Joomla!, you will learn about best-practice design and coding for Joomla! components, modules, plugins and other extensions. <br /><br />You will also learn about customizing the page output, using JavaScript effects, making use of Web Services from within Joomla! and ensuring that your code is secure and error-free.<br /><br />A unique and comprehensive reference to the main areas of interest within the Joomla! framework is also included in the book.</p> <p><a href="http://www.packtpub.com/article/joomla-one-point-five-extension-framework-table-of-contents"><br /></a></p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Appendix

Attacks


Whether or not we like to think about it, there is always the potential threat of an attacker gaining access to our Joomla! websites. The most common way in which security is breached in Joomla! is through third-party extension security flaws.

Due to the number of extensions that have security defects, there is an official list of extensions that are considered insecure, available in the FAQ sections at http://help.joomla.org.

It is very important that, as third-party extension developers, we take great care in making our extensions as secure as we can. In this section we will investigate some of the more common forms of attack and how we can prevent them from affecting our extensions and we will take a look at how we can deal with users whom we believe to be attackers.

How to Avoid Common Attacks

The security flaws that we will investigate are some of the most likely to be exploited because they tend to be the easiest to initiate and there is plenty of literature explaining how to...