The Open Source Template Conundrum

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Watch Your Ass or Slappy will Git Ya! 

Granny Gotta Gun

I enjoy using WYSIWYG Template Makers because they produce fast lovely results, particularly Oleg's templates, the guy who was behind the original Artisteer and now this product I am using Nice page. 

However! even though WYSIWYG templates were designed to support non-technical web designers, you can't afford to trust them totally.

If you are a web designer or site manager, you must still watch your ass and take some technical precautions to ensure you are not leaving your website open to hackers who just can't help themselves but sport with the weaknesses of your source code.

The Open Source Code Fright

Have been through 25 years of good and seriously bad times with Joomla but have remained faithful for sheer convenience.  The latest Joomla 4 is marvelous! (congratulations Joomla).  With the help of another Oleg of RSJoomla, we have managed to keep our sites protected with their security add-on RS-Firewall.

Running RS-Firewall identifies all the technical issues and weakness of the site after install - it only takes one little CHMOD 777 page in your site to allow a hacker in, to do whatever they like.  Running the check site facility and bolting the website down like Fort Knox keeps Slappy at bay.

Unfortunately, I got a bad case of Covid in Indonesia and did not run the Site Checker until a couple of months after installing the template ... Seven bleeding CHMOD 777 css pages ... grr!

This was a problem that was fixed in Artisteer ... how is this still possible?

BTW if you use the html page creator facility in Nice Page, you have probably already worked out Nice Page creates a duplicate page (like Artisteer).  Page will be penalized by Google for using redirects - so I tweak the meta code on the other page (not index page) with the no index follow command.  

The other trap is duplicating site work - today I spent 5 hours cleaning out the code that had been retained from duplicating template styles from about 5 domains  ago  ...  Got to start clean.