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Issue 3

the Art of Joomla - Editorial

What's new in Joomla! 1.5.x

Now, there's a story to this first one because I initially disapproved of its inclusion (my apologies again, JM). The Mass Mail component is pretty basic, but had the annoying property of sending the message to the groups selected in the "To" mail field. Obviously this had some major privacy issues, so the component now allows you to blind carbon copy (bcc) the recipients.

A check box for this on the mail form is set by default (so you can turn it off if you need to).

The second change I want to quickly mention is the ability to now disable the new Flash uploader.

Personally I find this new uploader brilliant but it doesn't seem to work happily on some hosts. You will find the switch to toggle it one or off in the Settings pane of the Global Configuration page.

Finally we have an interesting new feature for Articles. If you look at the Article parameters dialog, you will see several new options at the bottom of the list for Filtering.

Traditionally this has been left to the particularly WYSIWYG editor that is in use, but this is not fool proof, nor does it account for sites that do not use an editor. These new options allow you do apply restrictions on the html tags and attributes that certain user groups are allowed submit in their content.

The Filter groups box allows you to select the groups to which the additional rules will be applied. Use control-click to select more than one.

The Filter Type allows you to specify:

• a White List – this means that you control the tags and attributes that are allowed
• a Black List – this means that you allow all tags and attributes except for the ones you list
• or No HTML – this mean, well, that no HTML tags are allowed – and that's final.

The Filter Tags field allows you to enter the tags that you want to either white or black list.

The Filter Attributes field allows you to enter the attributes of the HTML tags that you want to either white or black list.

This has many uses from being able to avoid the deliberate insertion of malicious javascript from someone who is in the Author Group, or could be used more widely to combat code-bloat caused by that terrible practice of cutting-and-pasting from Word. To give you an example, a simple white list might have the following settings:

• Filter groups: Select Author and Editor
• Filter type: Select White list
• Filter tags: p, br, a, ul, ol, li
• Filter attributes: href, target

This combination will only allow users in the Author or Editor group to save content leaving the most basic of tags, and only allowing the href and target attributes (used in the anchor tag).

If you are more trusting of your users, you may want to choose a Black List and only filter out such things as applet or script tags.

Hopefully you will find these new feature fixes useful from time to time.