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Starfish Websites

We specialise in website design & build and Local Search Marketing for businesses in the property and construction industries.

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News from the beach hut
Joomla 4.2.8

The Joomla! Security Strike Team (JSST) have just made this announcement and we've updated our client's websites accordingly.

Joomla! 4.2.8 is now available. This is a security release for the 4.x series of Joomla! which addresses a critical security vulnerability in the web services API. We strongly recommend that you update your sites immediately.

I cannot remember the last time there was a High Severity, Critical Impact update required for Joomla, which just goes to show what a reliable and secure content management system it is, trusted by over 1 million organisations around the world and more than 35,000 in the UK.

This is due to a highly committed and well-organised team of security experts dealing with these security issues and rapidly releasing fixes.

Due to the severity of this security issue, it is essential you update your Joomla 4.x site without delay as we have just done for our clients.

The JSST have also strongly advised the following:

After the release, we strongly advise you to renew the passwords for all credentials that are stored in the global site configuration, namely:

database
SMTP
Redis
HTTP proxy

So here are my tips on how to change the database user password without potentially breaking your website:

  1. Using an FTP client (FileZilla is great), download a copy of configuration.php and edit it, changing the value of public $password = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'; to a new password and save this file.
  2. Rename it configuration-edit.php and upload back to the server.
  3. Edit the database user password in cPanel->MySQL® Databases page.
  4. Now using your FTP client, delete the configuration.php file on the server and rename configuration-edit.php to configuration.php.
  5. Very important - Change the file permissions of configuration.php now to 444.
  6. Check the website still works!

We maintain numerous Joomla websites for our clients, ensuring they are always secure and performing well.

If you need any help with maintaining your Joomla website or want a quote to upgrade it to Joomla 4, please contact us below.

Joomla! Logo

Do you have a Joomla website that needs fixing or updating and you want a UK Joomla expert that you can trust to quickly and efficiently fix these problems?

You've come to the right place!

New Swaffham Museum website

Starfish Websites have launched a new website for Swaffham Museum at https://www.swaffhammuseum.co.uk.

Swaffham Museum is a small, independent social history museum for Swaffham and the surrounding villages in Norfolk from the Stone Age to the modern.

HTTP/2 & QUIC

Starfish Websites hosting now includes:

  • Ultrafast PHP 7.4 and 8.x
  • LiteSpeed Web Server
  • HTTP/3 and QUIC
  • Full Page Caching

Starfish Websites have been chosen to build a new website for Swaffham Museum and to provide Local Search Marketing services to raise their profile and grow visitor numbers.

So watch this space!

Security tags cloud

With so much business being done online nowadays, online and website security (also cybersecurity) should be taken very seriously and equally important as your business insurance policies. The cost of implementing and managing online security is a business overhead that must be included in business setup and investment finance planning.

Person sweeping website components

For many businesses, the website often gets neglected due to more pressing prioirties and it gradually becomes less fit for purpose due to the fast pace of technology moving on.

Your website must become mobile responsive if it isn't already

Nowadays your website must work well with phones and tablets in both portrait and landscape mode. This is essential now with the availability of fast mobile data connectivity allowing people to find information and do shopping with their mobile devices whilst away from their office or home.

GDPR European Flag Symbol

If you are capturing personal information through your website using contact or registration forms or any other method and this information is processed or stored within the EU then you must ensure your business and website is complaint with this new regulation.

Starfish Websites has recently been advising and implementing GDPR compliancy changes for our clients' websites including:

  • Upgrading from HTTP to HTTPS using our auto-renewable free SSL certificates managed through our website hosting platform.
  • Writing appropriate Privacy Policy information pages.

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Office Hours: Mon-Fri 9:00am - 5:30pm

Based in Brighton & Hove, East Sussex, United Kingdom

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