I’ve been at my current project for more than 2 years and recall that at the beginning, I used CFLayout with its siblings CFWindow and CFLayoutarea etc. These are implementations of ColdFusion’s Ajax and I have to say I was very impressed. Using them makes piecemeal of difficult tasks like paneling where you would have one panel make things happen in another. For instance you can have a form in one panel and the results of submitting it can be seen in another panel, all without the page refreshing. The coding required is so simple its just unbelievable. No more dealing with jQuery and its complicated syntax. Of course, it does help to know what’s going on behind the scenes and what ColdFusion is doing but its not necessary. I was given a task, and I’m still amazed at how quickly and easily it was to start. In just a few hours we had the whole thing working and it just came down to making it look pretty. All the functionality was implemented using already established ColdFusion practices and paneling everything. Continue Reading

So for the second time, one of my Joomla sites has been hacked. Apparently using the same source. The problem apparently comes form the installation where I left one of the directories open. With a scan, a hacker could’ve easily determined this vulnerability and simply exploited it. Now I have to go through the pain of putting the site back together again. This would have been a great problem if the site was a money maker.

So you say it was my fault for leaving the back door open. Well that is the reason why banks have things such as time out for their sites. With PhP, you could know where things are open and this should’ve either been closed by the application itself or at least prompt me that I should.

Now I’ve been through the workings of Drupal and I’ll be the first to say that I feel a lot more secure on this platform than Joomla! Yes, its a pain in the butt to get going with its round the world approach to doing even the simplest things. The thing is I feel much more secure. Granted this may be the works of people who’s purpose it is to make money from crippled sites having them send out spam or whatever dta junk they pass around the internet.

Details on the hack would come later but from this experience, I can safely say . . . Joomla Sucks!! Well I should be a little more concerned as this is the platform that powers most of the sites I have running out there. The thing is however is still unsecured and until I can feel this being different, I’ll be doing Drupal installs. I can’t afford to expose my customers with this level of incompetence.

And oh, did I mention WordPress? There’s another platform I’ve been messing with. I can’t recall there being WordPressl

In the web development world, you know You’ve met a geek when they talk of the glories of Open Source software. You’ll hear of how much better Linux is than Windows, how much you don’t have to spend on any of the technologies that are open source and how much “easier” they are to use. Of course, no one speaks to the time factor involved. Time as a cost is always something to be looked at and here is where much of the hidden cost of OpenSource software comes into play.

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