How to detect if a site uses Joomla!

Tuesday, 10 February 2009 11:37

While it is easy to detect what version of Joomla a site is running, it is not as easy to detect what revision a site is running. By this, I mean that you can easily tell if the site is running 1.0.x or 1.5.x. It is not as easy to detect if a site is running 1.5.8 vs 1.5.9. As much as I would love to share the ins and outs of detecting revisions, that would be very bad to make publicly known. Why, you ask? Well, if you can read this, so can hackers. Joomla! is not perfect. Like any software, there have been security flaws that have been dealt with. For those administrators that have not kept up with the upgrades like they should have, it would give hackers an upper hand on which sites to target.

Okay, now onto the good stuff! The easiest way to determine if a site is using Joomla! or not is to view the source code of the page.

By default, all Joomla! 1.5.x sites will have the following in the head of their site:

And, Joomla! 1.0.x sites will have the following:

This method is not full proof as I know a lot of people that remove it.

The second easiest way to determine if a site is using Joomla! or not is to type "/administrator" in the address bar after the URL.

Site using Joomla! 1.5.x should have a header that looks similar to this:

20090210_1

Site using Joomla! 1.0.x should have a header that looks similar to this:

Now, we have to consider the fact that some websites change their admin template. Personally, I do not see a good reason to. Although, I did hear a client once say that the administrator in Joomla! 1.0.x looked "too Fisher-Price®".

So, what happens if someone has the directory itself password protected? Well, given the fact that there is actually an "administrator" directory, this gives you insight that it could very well be Joomla.

And finally, if all else fails, you can always do the following for both Joomla! 1.0.x and Joomla! 1.5.x. Take the website's homepage and add "?tp=1" on to the end of the it.

See this example: http://www.joomla.org/?tp=1

Pretty neat, huh?

Set as favorite

Email This

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry