If you’re regularly following the news about major CMS’s, then you’d have probably heard by now that over 50,000 WordPress websites were hacked in the course of a few days. Potentially, another million or so WordPress websites could be also compromised. The cause of this onslaught of hacks is an exploit in a WordPress plugin (by the way, the term “plugin”, in WordPress, can be the equivalent of a Joomla component, module, or plugin) called MailPoet. The exploit allowed the attacker to upload a PHP script into the website, giving him absolute power over the website.
Now, what does this have anything to do with Joomla? It’s a WordPress exploit, and not a Joomla exploit, after all.
Yes, we know that, but we have worked on quite a few Joomla websites where the blog is powered by WordPress, either using a Joomla extension (the extension is typically corePHP’s WordPress Blog for Joomla), or by just uploading WordPress into a sub-directory of the Joomla website. We don’t like this practice, and we don’t like it for 3 reasons:
- The administrator has two websites to maintain, and not just one: two websites where the core and the extensions (plugins) must be always updated, two websites to secure, two websites to optimize, etc…
-
Any exploit on either site is potentially contagious, which means that an exploit can very well lead to two hacked websites, which means that the administrator has to clean two websites, instead of one (or he must pay for the cleanup of two websites).
-
There are nearly always SEF issues because of conflicts between the .htaccess located under the root directory of the Joomla website, and that located under the root directory of the WordPress website (which is a sub-directory of the Joomla website).
An additional (yet far less critical) problem, is that the administrator has to maintain a consistent look & feel on two different CMS’s, and not just one. That’s not an easy task and it’s very, very time consuming.
So, what can you do if you really want a blog on your Joomla website?
Well, you don’t have to install WordPress at all, you can use Joomla! Yes, you can create some template overrides for your content to make it look like a blog, you can install a commenting extension such as JComments (or maybe embed Disqus through the use of a plugin or a module), and you’re off to go. Better yet, you can use K2 (which also works very well with JComments) to build your blog! You really do not need to have a WordPress website within your Joomla website to make that blog happen.
If you’re currently running a WordPress website within your Joomla website, and if you want to consolidate all your content in your Joomla website, then we can help. All you need to do is to contact us and we will do it for you in very little time and for a very affordable cost.