In an attempt to leave our respective comfort zones, Ruth and I have been trying each others specialism in their spare time. Ruth's been having adventures installing and running a GNU/Linux based system, and I've been designing and building a site using Joomla! 1.5
Amongst various issues I've encountered, I found that enabling Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL's broke my new site. Rather than a nicely formatted site, resplendant with images the site returned plain text in a column on the right hand side of a white page!
I came across this error today when editing an article in K2 - every time I saved the article I was getting this timeout error.
After a bit of googling I found several references to content editors adding code into the article text, which the filter tries to clean up - hence causing the timeout errors.
We are often approached, as are many Joomla! developers, by those unfortunate enough to have their websites exploited for one reason or another, asking us to fix the immediate problem and also secure their site against future attacks. Needless to say this can be quite costly, not ownly in our fees but also in terms of business downtime and potential loss of clients visiting your sites, and loss of confidence (particularly with Ecommerce sites). Here are some basic tips to help you secure your site and prevent this happening in the first place.
Are you sick of receiving spam submissions on your Joomla! website forms? Do you have spam bots sign up for accounts and post on your forums? There are several options available to you nowadays to work against these pesky spammers!
If you've secured your site using JSecure, you'll know that you need to browse to /administrator/?keyword to access your admin back-end. What happens if you forget the keyword, or something goes wrong with the jSecure plugin?

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE HAS AN UPDATE AVAILABLE HERE
The number of people I see posting on forums asking for support on components who are running versions of Joomla! sometimes 4 or more versions out of date is really quite alarming - when I point out to them the error of their ways, often the first question is "Well how do I upgrade to the latest version?". Hopefully this article should help clarify the process involved with installing the latest patches for Joomla! and help you stay up to date!
Joomla! docs has a full walk-through of this process, which is where most of the information in this article is from.
