Web site owners and creative service providers take notice. Beware of a scam in the guise of a project or service inquiry coming through web contact forms.

Azurelink attended Joomla Day Boston 2015 which was held at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center at M.I.T. on March 14 and 15. About 80 attendees from around the world came to this year's conference which was celebrating ten years of Joomla, one of the world's most popular open-source content management systems and a mainstay of Azurelink's service offerings.

Here's a quick solution to help Joomla administrators or users who can't login to the admin area and get the message "Unable to connect to the LDAP Server". LDAP stands for Light Directory Access Protocol. Joomla uses an LDAP library to help with authentication when logging in.

The problem is more than likely due to the password being corrupted in the database. The password won't work so Joomla can't authenticate it.

There may times when Joomla's LDAP files may be corrupted and would need to be replaced with clean versions, but the methods described below usually fix the problem. Let's try those first.

Joomla 2.5.x is an advanced content management system (CMS) offering site administrators full control over their web sites. Everything from creating and editing content articles on pages, to modular content (ads, calendars, tag clouds, etc.), to menus and site architecture can be managed from within Joomla's administrative system. This tutorial covers the process of creating new content articles for blog roll use within the Joomla 2.5 generation CMS with the JCE editor installed (Joomla Content Editor).

Smart, but ethical email marketers try to get their mailings in front of as many eyeballs as they can, often partnering with other companies to gain access to their list members. If you're creating campaigns using MailChimp templates, it's not exactly clear how to export your emails in HTML format with all of the formatting and links intact to send to mailing partners. Here's how to do it.

Unwary installers of the powerful SEBLOD Content Construction Kit (CCK) from Octopoos sometimes find out that its learning curve is more than they bargained for, or that it is overkill for their site. If they atttempt to uninstall the SEBLOD component, they find out that their Joomla articles have some unwanted artifacts which remain in them: SEBLOD tags which display as funny text in their articles. They look like this: ::cck::24::/cck::

What follows is a method for removing the unwanted tag text using a text editor capable of doing Grep pattern searching. There may be other ways of doing this, but this method worked for me. I also shared it with the SEBLOD folks via their support forum.

Here's how to use server side 301 redirects to help search engines find your content — and preserve your search result rankings — after modifying your site architecture, menu system, changing content, or building a new site. With a little bit of pre-planning you can let search engines know that a page has permanently moved to a new page address (URL).

Joomla.org has announced a security update for the Joomla 2.5.x series. Version 2.5.8 fixes a moderately severe clickjacking vulnerability issue affecting version 2.5.7 and all earlier 2.5.x versions. All Joomla site admins are advised to update their sites as soon as possible via your administrator areas by clicking on Components/Joomla! Update and clicking the "Install the update" button.

Joomla 2.5 has many great features including an easy way to update the version of Joomla to the latest version using a one click method. Instead of dragging a patch directory over the Joomla directory, or gasp, dragging files individually to their respective directories, site administrators can now use the Joomla! Update component to keep Joomla up-to-date.

But I've been running into a significant glitch on my 2.5 sites when using the Joomla! Update component — and so have others as evidenced by posts on the Joomla Community Forums.

As a site owner or webmaster, you want to do everything you can to optimize your site properly for search engines. It may seem odd, but a little technicality like having or not having the "www" in your site address can cause search engines to consider your site to be a duplicate of itself, hurting its search engine ranking. You need to redirect traffic using Apache's mod_rewrite to redirect site visitor traffic to a single web address.