please help
taken over by something Turkish
This site pays the mortgage of the business
Please help us get our site up and running as soon as possible

thankyou

www.sundeck.com.au

Yeah! Great anthem, huh!

Do you have a site back-up?

If not, I'd be making copies of the text content and images from the cached versions of all pages, ASAP, before Google makes a new cache. From these, you can rebuild the site.

Before you rebuild, you'll need to change your usernames and passwords and take other security measures.

how do I change the password?
where do I save the pages?
thanks
Deb

no I don't have a backup
I have just bought the business a few weeks ago with the website up and running
where would I look for a backup

what does a cache mean?

thanks

Hey Deb!

Now please don't take offence at anything I say. Not meaning to put you down.

I guess the pros are off for the long weekend, so you're stuck with me by the looks of it.

A website needs regular maintenance and a Joomla website is rather complex, though from what I can see from the remains of the site, it is a fairly basic site, though well designed. A pro job, I'd say.

You'll need a professional web designer, proficient in Joomla. Not much you can do yourself.

Maybe you can contact the person who built the site.

They will need access to your account and site on several levels. Usernames, passwords, host. If you can't track down the person who holds that information, you may as well kiss the website goodbye.

Your webmaster will need to get into the files and see what damage is done. If you're lucky, maybe the hackers didn't delete your database, but you'd have to be pretty lucky. The original webmaster should have a backup, if you can find him.

In the mean time, I'd be buisy copy and paste whatever you can salvage of the content and save it as a txt file in Notepad. Save the images from the front page in a graphics programme. Looks like only the home page images still there.

You'll find the cached version of the sites pages as follows:

Do this search in Google: *site:www.sundeck.com.au* Just copy what's between the stars, but not the stars, into the Google search box and hit Enter. Click on where it says Cached for each page of the site and copy and paste what you can. Don't worry about the formatting. Your webmaster can easily sort that out. It's the content that matters.

But at the end of the day, if you can't find the original webmaster or if he doesn't have a site backup. I'd say it will need a fresh start. So save whatever you can of the content as a starting point.

Keep in touch. I'll see if I can make a copy and can e-mail it to you.

Deb,

Ouch. Usually these type of hacks can be resolved by unpacking a new copy of Joomla over your existing installation, which then replaces any files that have been hacked. Usually these include the index.php file in the root of the site, and the index.php file for your template.

Typing in a few URLS to see what's damaged on your site, I'm afraid it's a little worse than usual.

The main file that drives Joomla is index.php in the root folder of the site. That is missing at the moment, and the hack has put some other default file in place. In this case, it's the index.html file in the root folder that is bringing up the hack. Delete the index.html file to get started on fixing the site.

Unpacking the latest Joomla installation zip file on your server (delete the installation folder straight away) will restore several other items that are missing - the templates folder looks like it's been deleted in the hack also.

The final part that is then missing and will need to be restored is the ja_cooper_business template. templates.joomlart.com/ja_cooper_business/ is the demo of the template - if it looks very different to what you had the site looking like, then you're likely to find that it has been customised by whoever made the site in the first place for the previous owners.

There also appears to be a module on the site that is invisibly putting some Italian news feed into the site - www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Asundeck.com.au shows results with "galline ovaiole allevare diversi di tasto basato" at the start of the snippets which is caused by this plugin.

To get someone else to fix it for you, you'll need to have the following information ready for them:

• Set up a Joomla Super Administrator account for them to be able to login (you can delete it then later)
• Have Cpanel or FTP account details available so that fixer can login to place and remove files
• They can look for a backup on your hosting if there is one. The templates folder may have just been renamed, so that should be checked as an option too.
• If you can get the previous designer's info to get the template from them, that may then speed up fixing up a template if there is no backup.

Hope that this helps you a little.

Patrick

thanks for the help
We are up and running.
Thank goodness the guy who put the site together came back into mobile phone range.

I have a new appreciation for our site.
It is a valuable asset.

Blessings to all.

If either of you, Patrick and Laurie, are ever on the Sunshine Coast and would like to stay in a beautiful place then please discuss this joomla interaction and I wll give you 50% off to show my appreciation.

Deb

So pleased for you Deb! I really was afraid it may have been the end of the site and a rebuild needed. In fact I saved all your text content and what images I could find.

Site looks great! A credit to you, your business and your web builder.

Thanks for the kind offer of hospitality. Not really my style however. Just got back from a few weeks traveling on a motorbike in remote areas of outback South Australia.

Camped one night on the gibber plain, beside the fence because the track had less stones to sleep on. Got some firewood from a pushed up old fence. Not a tree to the horizon.

Next night camped on an ironstone hill. Kicked the worst of the stones out of the way. Managed to find a spot with a few sticks of firewood, just as the sun went down. Wild emus circled my camp in the morning, looking for a free feed.

Best wishes with the luxury appartments! We're poles apart, hey!

Regards,
Laurie.

yes and no.

It sounds like you are having adventures I have had in the past and hope to have again in the future.

The project I have moved away from is www.noosaforestretreat.com
You might like to have a look at it. People sharing hinterland property living in caravans and building mudbrick structures growing the most delicious bananas and mangoes along with waterfalls, native bees and the like.

People describe it as like Jurassic Park.

Thankyou for having such a kind heart.

Blessings

Deb

Deb,

Glad you're back up and running. Thanks for the offer, may follow up on it should we be in that part of the world soon.

A few quick and simple things you might want to look at to further optimise the site:

• turn on SEF URLS in your global configuration (see my SEO presentation from JoomlaDay Sydney) to enable some basic search engine optimisation
• look at the size of some of the images on the site as they take a while to load - temp.png in the heading is 217kb, where as it could be as little as 20kb for the same image size = 10% of the loading time
• Install akeeba backup and configure a front end cron job to automatically schedule your site's backup. For cron you might need some more assistance from your webhost.

Patrick