“Dirty” Joomla Templates Distributed
By Brandon Dawson on Aug 3, 2007 in Joomla, Technology
5ThirtyOne is running a story today about popular free themes being crammed with malicious and/or spammy code, then being re-released.
This is a problem with the free template scene, and those who would take such major advantage of it. I’ve had so many clients that want “a duplicate of X website” or “just take this free or commercial theme and adapt it”. But of course, this lazy approach to designing a winning website leaves you prone to a lot of problems, not the least of which is the fact that such people typically have no idea what the code in their template means, and therefore wouldn’t know an unnecessary PHP include from the mandatory PHP hooks for Joomla.
As such, they have no idea why their sites are underperforming in search engines, they have no idea why their visitors are leaving to odd websites, and no clue what to do about it if they did. All they know is that they “developed” a website that should’ve cost at least a couple thousand dollars for pennies on the dollar. If they knew better, they’d care. But they don’t, and that hurts all of us.
