UPDATE- the Joomla team added this functionality to the core, and with a current release version it is easy to hide menu items. Simply look for the 'Link Type' tab when editing the menu item, and set the 'Display in Menu' option to no. This will hide your menu item in the menu. If you are still using an older version of Joomla you'll need to keep reading below, but you should upgrade your Joomla install.

Do you need to add pages to your Joomla website that don't appear on the public navigation? We wrote a post about this recently, and described the process to add these to a hidden menu.

A hidden menu is a menu that does not appear on the public navigation on your website. The process for adding a hidden menu in the Joomla admin is:

In some instances it may be useful to add a page to your Joomla site which is not accessible via the public navigation menus. Here's a tutorial showing you how to add a hidden page. Be sure to scroll down to see the video tutorial.

By: Frank Petrov

What a treat it was to attend Joomla Day Florida 2017 on February 25th and 26th, 2017. This was the second year the conference was held, and Jason Nickerson did an excellent job of organizing a fun and educational event.

As it was in 2016, the conference was held at the Hillsborough Community College Ybor City Campus in sunny Tampa. If you've not visited before, Ybor City is a vibrant shopping and dining spot with current businesses occupying what were once the many cigar factories. "It was founded in the 1880s by Vicente Martinez-Ybor and other cigar manufacturers and was populated by thousands of immigrants, mainly from Cuba, Spain, and Italy. For the next 50 years, workers in Ybor City's cigar factories rolled hundreds of millions of cigars annually." (courtesy wikipedia).

Like other Joomla conferences I have attended, the educational sessions were split into categories for Business, Design, and Development. With a diverse group that ranged from agency owners to developers to end users, this gave everyone good choices for learning more about topics that are useful in their day to day work. 

We've noticed an increase in new website hosting clients coming to us with hacked Joomla!™ websites. In the past 7 weeks, we've upgraded and cleaned six such sites. In many cases, the client's existing website hosting company had taken their website offline until the issues were resolved because in all these cases there were malicious files in place on the host's server.

It's an unfortunate situation because in today's world businesses need a well designed and functioning website to attract new customers, or often to qualify their company to prospects that have been solicited with other marketing efforts. When your website is offline it can't fulfill these outcomes.

Even worse, your company's reputation can be hurt greatly if the hackers have installed malicious scripts to send our spam from your domain. No none likes to receive spam emails, and if they originate from your corporate domain that's sure to hurt business. Spam originating from your domain can also cause your domain to be blacklisted, meaning that your legitimate emails may be blocked on the receiving end.

Written By: Frank Petrov

I spent this past weekend in Vancouver attending the Joomla World Conference. Vancouver is a vibrant, beautiful city and I enjoyed seeing some sights, but the real joy was getting to know some of the other community members, or Joomlers, and getting to know the project a little better.

If you're not familiar with Joomla, it is an open source content management (CMS) that was voted Best Free CMS in 2016. I started working with Joomla in 2003, before it actually existed as Joomla. You can read more about that here, but basically Joomla forked from another project called Mambo.