Blog de Dionysopoulos

I am Nicholas Dionysopoulos. I am a developer — mostly PHP but I occasionally dabble in Dart/Flutter and anything else I get my hands on. I hail from Greece.

I mostly known as the lead developer of award-winning backup and security solutions for PHP-powered sites and a frequent contributor to the Joomla! CMS.

1. A simple question, isn't

   Today I got sidetracked by an article trying to answer a simple Joomla! question, and the incredibly wrong direction it took the answer to. I ended up writing the not-so-straightforward code to answer the question correctly, and had a lot of reflection on how changing, or omitting, the context of a question can be problematic.

2. The Joomla 4.2.8 security fix and why it's NOT the end of the world

   On Thursday, Friday 16th at 16:00 UTC Joomla released version 4.2.8 with a major security fix. The vulnerability, they warned, was a very serious one and you would all need to update. However, the necessary information gap which follows a security release —so as not to tip off miscreants— has let rumours spread in such a way that they make people risk unnecessary damage to their site, or at least give the false impression that all Joomla sites have been “magically” hacked like we're in some Hollywood movie. That's not how the world works, so please let us explain exactly what is going on and you should not freak out.

3. Displaying Mastodon toots on your Joomla site

   With the meteoric rise in popularity of Mastodon following the acquisition of The Bird Site Which Shall Not Be Named^* by You-Know-Who^*  a question has been forming in everyone's head: “How can I display my toots (posts) timeline on my site?”. People looking for some Joomla modular embed code will be disappointed to find none. However, you need no third party module, no embed code, and no JavaScript! Everything you need is already included in Joomla itself.

   ^* I've heard the new overlord is a very capricious and litigious fella. I am sure y'all know what I am talking about.

4. Common mistakes writing Joomla 4 plugins

   Over the years I have had the chance to review hundreds of Joomla! plugins written by different developers, typically when they are causing a site to break in unexpected ways. It turns out, most plugins suffer a few very common and easily preventable problems.

5. Hello, Apple Silicon

   Two weeks ago I finally received a Mac mini M1 with the brand-new, ARM-based M1 (Apple Silicon) processor. There’s been a lot of speculation and conflicting information about its performance. I would like to talk about it in the context of web development. Just to give you an idea: it’s a monster worth every penny of its modest price.