joomla

By default Joomla's RSS feeds do not provide an absolute URL to the content item which leaves the RSS looking like the following:
<link>some_piece_of_content.html</link>

This is okay when the RSS source is the host website but if you are running the feed through FeedBurner some feed readers (and Technorati) can get confused. When they get confused the resulting URL to the source item becomes:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/some_piece_of_content.html

By default Joomla changes all formatting in RSS feeds to CDATA (ie non-html interpretable) fields. This creates ugly and very difficult to read feeds sometimes. To fix this edit the following file:

$JOOMLA_DIRECTORY/components/com_rss/rss.php

Find the line that reads:

$item_description = mosHTML::cleanText( $item_description );

at approximately line 197, comment it out.
This should create more aesthetically pleasing RSS feeds (with working hyperlinks and image tags).

Next go to about line 266 where the line that reads: '$item_link = sefRelToAbs( $item_link );' and add:

Of late I have been pretty busy and have not been able to do much maintenance on the website. For some unknown reason the comments function stopped working and thanks to a renegade SUSE PHP security update the mod_rewrite Apache extension stopped working (resulting in a lot of dead links).

This morning I upgraded Mambo to the latest version (4.5.3) and found things were going so well that I did a full migration across to Joomla 1.04. This migration turned out a lot easier than I first expected which is a welcome relief. Now the comments section works as expected and I have put in place some Apache redirects so that the more popular mod_rewrite links continue to function as normal. Hopefully Novell/SUSE will sort their PHP package out and get mod_rewrite working again (it has been a good week since it broke so hopefully it will be any day now).

At the moment this site is still on Mambo but when things quieten down I will be migrating across to Joomla! as I have a feeling it will have a stronger development path. I just wrote the following email to my friend in order to give him some information about Mambo/Joomla! so I figure why not post this up on the site so that if anyone else asks in the future the information in close at hand.

Joomla! is a completely open-source fork of Mambo. Mambo 4.5.2 code-wise is identical to Joomla! 1.0 except there's a few security/bug tweaks and different graphics are used. At the moment components/modules are compatible between the two systems but I can see a day when this won't be the case in the not too distant future.

Joomla! is a completely open-source branch of Mambo, a popular content management system I use for this site. There has always been some difficulty with the licensing of Mambo which has caused friction between the owners of the intellectual property and the open source developers.