Blog de Dionysopoulos

I am Nicholas Dionysopoulos. I am a developer — mostly PHP but I occasionally dabble in Dart/Flutter and anything else I get my hands on. I hail from Greece.

I mostly known as the lead developer of award-winning backup and security solutions for PHP-powered sites and a frequent contributor to the Joomla! CMS.

1. RTFM for Joomla and WordPress developers

   PHP, Joomla!, and WordPress keep changing. You're locked in a constant uphill battle to react to those changed. It's painful, and draining. There's a better way. You just need to… RTFM!

2. The grass isn't greener on the other side

   You're so frustrated with Joomla and having to rebuild your Joomla 3 site that you've made up your mind: you're going to WordPress! Been there, done that, got the t-shirt 👕

3. A simple question, isn't

   Today I got sidetracked by an article trying to answer a simple Joomla! question, and the incredibly wrong direction it took the answer to. I ended up writing the not-so-straightforward code to answer the question correctly, and had a lot of reflection on how changing, or omitting, the context of a question can be problematic.

4. The Joomla 4.2.8 security fix and why it's NOT the end of the world

   On Thursday, Friday 16th at 16:00 UTC Joomla released version 4.2.8 with a major security fix. The vulnerability, they warned, was a very serious one and you would all need to update. However, the necessary information gap which follows a security release —so as not to tip off miscreants— has let rumours spread in such a way that they make people risk unnecessary damage to their site, or at least give the false impression that all Joomla sites have been “magically” hacked like we're in some Hollywood movie. That's not how the world works, so please let us explain exactly what is going on and you should not freak out.

5. Displaying Mastodon toots on your Joomla site

   With the meteoric rise in popularity of Mastodon following the acquisition of The Bird Site Which Shall Not Be Named^* by You-Know-Who^*  a question has been forming in everyone's head: “How can I display my toots (posts) timeline on my site?”. People looking for some Joomla modular embed code will be disappointed to find none. However, you need no third party module, no embed code, and no JavaScript! Everything you need is already included in Joomla itself.

   ^* I've heard the new overlord is a very capricious and litigious fella. I am sure y'all know what I am talking about.