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We use XAMPP as well as WAMP, but our XAMPP’s PHP was outdated.

Go to this URL: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/

Download the latest “Portable Package“.

In our XAMPP directory we renamed two folders “apache” and “php” by adding “-old” to each folder. We used 7-Zip to open the downloaded “Portable Package” and extracted the two folders “apache” and “php” into the “C:/xampp/” folder. We restarted our XAMPP by stopping and starting it again.

We were so please when everything was working the way it should. Many other tutorials on this didn’t include replacing the Apache folder, but those techniques didn’t work for us.

We thought we were done till we needed to access PHPmyAdmin. This was not connecting. Looking around on the web we found a great article from OS Training that resolved our issue. We renamed our phpmyadmin folder in XAMPP by adding “-old“, and coping the folder from the “Portable Package”. Next we copied the file “config.inc.php” from the old folder to the new one. This resolved our PHPmyAdmin issue. Now we were fully upgraded without reinstalling XAMPP.

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We have used Rocket Theme’s Gantry templates a number of times, but have never liked having the images stored in the Gantry/Images folder. We are use to using Joomla‘s native Media folder, and were happy when we found the way in Gantry to do this. We will show you how to do it.

• Log into the back end of the site, and go to site’s template.
  There is a different path between Joomla 3 and Joomla 4.
• Go into the “Styles” aspect of any of the Gantry templates you are using. We have 5 gantry templates we run, so just pick one.
• In the upper-right click on the “Extras” button and select “Platform Settings“.
  

Click on the “System – Gantry 5” tab and toggle “Use Joomla Images Folder“.

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We have found that following Google’s Search Console tips work great for your website’s Search Engine Results, so we get an email from Google saying there is a issue with Mobile we jump on it. We got one today and we don’t remember being directed to the following page before. We decided to post this URL to help ourselves as well as others. Here is the link to Google’s Mobile Friendly tester.

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?hl=en

We will be looking at each of the sites maintain to help our customer stay at the top of search engine results. Staying on top of our search engines results has been a huge benefit to our business, and we hope to do the same for yours.

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We received a letter from Domain Registry looking to renew our domain. They sent a form for us to fill out with credit card information or we can go to their website to pay the bill. They do not own our domain, so this is a complete scam.

Their website looks totally legit, and has a form to pay for the domain renewal online. These attempts are looking more legitimate and we want to make sure our customers don’t get taken by this scam. Feel free to pass this information to anyone.

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When designing a website it is hard to see the full web page when the content is added, so printing the full page is helpful to show the customer. We were looking for a quick way to do this and found Firefox has a great tool built-in. We used the following documentation from Mozilla to figure out how to take a full page screen shot.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/take-screenshots-firefox

In the end it is so easy. Just Shift +CTL + s, but give it time to build. Then you can save and print it.

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For the past 7 years we always install some type of Web Access Firewall into the sites we build, and have noticed in recent months more attempts to access the sites. As more websites come online and the skills of hackers also develop the need to protect those sites become increasingly more important. A simple site often stores the credentials of at least one or two users. This will often be a name, email address, and a password.

One of the ones we like to use is “RSFirewall“. They have been great with our Joomla sites and the past couple of years we have used their free version on a number of WordPress sites with no issues. Most attacks come from 3 party plug-ins vulnerability, but brute force is still very common.

Hackers can reverse the encryption to expose the password of user and use this password and email address to potentially use this to get money. Installing a WAF can be easy, and we encourage every site owner to install one. We always make sure a site can be fully recovered before installing any plugins or components by making a complete backup of the files and database. We are always here to help anyone with their websites.

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We feel you should always update, but on this update we had an issue. First if you are going to update make a full back up of the site and download it. We have a bunch of WordPress site so we started to update a few this morning. The first one is using DIVI wouldn’t install the update, but didn’t break the site. The second site a running a Gantry template ran until “updating database” where it sat for 10 minutes. . In the end we got all the sites updated, so stick with it.

The DIVI site wouldn’t install the update the first couple of times. We were ready to do a manual update after we ran a full backup, but ran the 5.9 update from the dashboard once the backup ran. We don’t know exactly fixed it issue, but glad it was updated without breaking anything.

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