If you ever had a Joomla! site hacked, you know how difficult it is to clean up the site. Hacked files can be sprinkled among the thousands of files and folders in the Joomla! filesystem and are not easily found by an administrator. Looking at file dates and combing through web server logs are the manual techniques to find these files, which is a laborious process and missing just one file is an opportunity for a site to be re-infected all over again. Hacked sites can be blocked by web browsers or shut down by ISP's until they are cleaned up.

Zap Audit is our newest Joomla! extension and was written by a Joomla! administrator for Joomla! administrators to combat hacking of Joomla! sites. It allows administrators to take back control of their Joomla! site. Zap Audit finds hacked files, recommends best practices based on a site analysis and provides proactive monitoring to minimize damage from future hack attacks. Zap Audit can save hours of work cleaning up a site, allowing you to delay or even eliminate the need to rebuild a hacked Joomla! website from scratch.  It runs entirely within your Joomla! website, so no data is transferred outside your company to a third party. Zap Audit can even analyze an offline site that is down due hacking or other reasons by analyzing the zipped files from the site using Zap Audit installed on another Joomla! site.

Your Joomla! site is analyzed by Zap Audit for hacked files in seven ways:

OK, so your Joomla! site is hacked. Maybe you received an e-mail from your hosting provider saying you need to fix the issue or they will shut your site down. Or, maybe your site is no longer accessible because your browser detects it as a bad site.  Or maybe your site has been hacked but you just don't know it yet.  In any scenario, Zap Audit was written to help you get your hacked Joomla! site back up and running. It finds hacked files, recommends best practices based on a site analysis and provides proactive monitoring to minimize future hacking of your site.

Zap Audit generates a detailed audit report of your site, showing hacked files, potential issues, and best practices.  A lite/free version is available that provides summary information of your site, which can be used to verify your site is free from hacks and provide peace of mind.  If an issue is found, you can use one of the paid versions of Zap Audit to obtain details of the hack and best practices recommendations.

Depending on the status of your site, there are two methods of running Zap Audit:

• On-Line Mode - Use this method if your site is relatively healthy and you can access the administrator back-end normally.
• Off-Line Mode - Use this method if your site is off-line or you cannot access your Joomla! administrator back-end. You can also use this method to check a Joomla! 2.5 site using Zap Audit installed on a Joomla! 3.x site.

These methods will be described below.

Z Content has been developing Joomla applications for over 10 years.  Our goal has been to create open source, quality applications that are fully featured and with no restrictions on how they are used or the number of sites they can be installed on. That was true over 10 years ago and it is still true today.

In addition to our paid Joomla applications, we have three high quality applications that are free and we are very proud of them. Download and try them out today. Our free Joomla applications are:

One of Zap Calendar's unique features is the ability to automatically post upcoming events to Facebook.  For example, an upcoming event in your calendar could be posted automatically 2 days prior to the event on your Facebook page. Over the years this feature has been accomplished through several services that have since come and gone.  Twitter Feed is the latest service to shut down that was used to push Zap Calendar events to Facebook. Fortunately, there is a new service that can also push events to Facebook and this service appears to be much more popular due to the multiple connected sources it supports.  Zapier (No relationship to Zap Calendar ;-) connects applications and automates workflows using "Zaps" (really, there is not relationship between us and them), and works very nicely with posting events from your Zap Calendar site to Facebook. This article describes how to configure Zapier and Zap Calendar to enable posting of events to Facebook. This feature is available with all versions of Zap Calendar, including the Lite version.

Zap Weather version 10 is now available. This release supports Joomla 3.x and includes support for PHP 7 and adds a new module for displaying forecasts.  This module can display the list of forecasts in either horizontal or vertical mode. There is also an option to enlarge the forecast icon and display a drop shadow below the icon.  Just use the module class suffixes of "horizontal", "vertical", "large" and "shadow" to change the appearance.

Zap Weather is a free Joomla component for displaying weather for any USA location or territory.  Since its first release over 11 years ago, Zap Weather has always been free and with "no commercial interruptions". That is, there are no fees, commercial advertising or links to external sites.  Zap Weather uses data from the National Weather Service, a USA government organization and its services are paid for by the tax dollars of USA citizens.  If you are not already using Zap Weather on your site, try it out today and let those tax dollars work for you!

More information about Zap Weather can be found here.