Changing Joomla favicon

Favicon is the favorites icon that is associated with your site and appears in the left of your browser address bar. Both Joomla! 1.0.x and 1.5.x come with a default favicon that displays the Joomla! Logo. You may change that as long as your new favicon is in the ICO format and sized 16×16 pixels. Here’s how to do it:

Unlike the 1.0.x versions, the only name you are allowed to use for your favicon is favicon.ico but you are offered the flexibility to associate different favicons with different templates. You only need to upload your favicon.ico into the main folders of your front-end and back-end templates, which are found in the /templates/ and the /administrator/templates/ folders respectively, overwriting any favicon files that came with your templates.

However, if you’d rather use a global favicon for all your templates themes, just upload it into Joomla!’s main folder (that’s where your index.php resides) and into the /administrator/ folder. Make sure you delete all favicon.ico files found in the template folders mentioned above because Joomla! will check your template folder first for the favicon.ico file.

Please take note that to see the new favicon you will need to empty your browser cache.

How to retrieve joomla admin password

In this article, let’s see how you can retrieve admin password if you forget it. If you know the email address that was used for the admin user, and you have made the “lost password” feature available on the front end, the simplest thing is to do is to use the “lost password” Front-end function. There are times that when you develop your Joomla! application on localhost and the mail function is not properly set up, so you can’t use email to retrieve your password if you forget.

So for those who can’t use the email to retrieve, you will need access to the MySQL database. You got two options, either add a new super administrator or change the password stored in the data base. To do so you need to go to phpMyAdmin (or use a similar tool) and manually alter the database. Before doing this, back up your entire Joomla! database.

From phpMyAdmin, you can run the following SQL query to create a new user known as adminb.

INSERT INTO `jos_users` VALUES
(62, 'Administrator2', 'adminb', 'your-email@email.com', '21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3',
'Super Administrator', 0, 1, 25, '2005-09-28 00:00:00', '2005-09-28 00:00:00', '', '');
INSERT INTO `jos_core_acl_aro` VALUES (10,'users','62',0,'Administrator2',0);
INSERT INTO `jos_core_acl_groups_aro_map` VALUES (25,'',10);

The password will be admin. Immediately log in and change this password and make any other changes to other admin users.

A second option would be to change the password in the table for your admin user. The password is stored in the MySQL database jos_users table password column. (Change this for your table prefix if different.)

Go to the table, find the row for your admin user, and then select that row for editing. The password must be hashed, you cannot simply enter text into this field.

Set the password to one of the known values shown below:

- password = "this is the MD5 hashed password"
------------------------------------------------------
- admin = 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3
- secret = 5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69
- OU812 = 7441de5382cf4fecbaa9a8c538e76783

Paste the hashed password into the field, save the change, and log in using the new password. Immediately change your password to something more secure!

How to allow authors to auto-publish in Joomla 1.5.x

How to allow authors to auto-publish in Joomla 1.5.x ? This can be achieved using third party components or modules such as ja submit or content submit. But i've got some little trick here to make our registered users or authors can publish the contents to our website without administrator approval.

The hack for Joomla 1.5.X is to change the following two files, note that the hack has to be applied to any future upgrade of the core.

components\com_content\controller.php
components\com_content\models\article.php

For the first comment out some lines around 229 as follows to stop the wrong message coming up on save:

// if ($access->canPublish)
// {
// Publishers, admins, etc just get the stock msg
$msg = JText::_('Item successfully saved.');
// }
// else
// {
// $msg = $isNew ? JText::_('THANK_SUB') : JText::_('Item successfully saved.');
// }

For the second file change a zero to one on line 332 or thereabouts. This opens the gate to authors.
// For new items - author is not allowed to publish - prevent them from doing so
$article->state = 1;

:), that;s it fellas!