It was another Thursday afternoon, of waiting for clients to finally reply to me, when I was told that one of our websites was down. I'm excused from not noticing this, because my colleague was in the middle of setting up our sites on MyJoomla.com ;-)

Anyway, I visit the site and I am visited with a nice jtablesession::store failed error. Joomla could no longer write to the _session table, which lead to a dramatic error - and the site stops working. The database flipped me off, while smirking at me.

The reason for this should be a lesson for all of you.

Every year, there seems to be a new "best Joomla! hosting company."  Rochen, Cloudaccess, Redhost... They all used to be the "favorites" of respected Joomla! members at some point in time.  And this fall, Siteground seems to be the "hottest thing since sliced bread."

We've already seen two respectable Joomla! developers who are now vouching for Siteground. When you visit their 'Hosting' page, promoting Siteground, you're greeted with some information about why Siteground is great. What immediately got my attention was the "Get hosting for $5,95 per month" button. I present to you: Exhibit A: (taken from Nonumber.nl, for the simple reason that was the last time I visited. No ill will here :) )

AdminTools, the ever growing Security & Utilities tool for Joomla might just become a bit more secure in the future. We overheard on Google+ (of all places) that Nicholas is working on adding Two-Step Verification by Google, which has just recently been made available for developers.

Two-step authentication adds another layer of security to your site. The feature is already available in Gmail. The concept goes like this: First, you log in providing your username and password. But you're not logged in yet! You'll need to also enter the pin code, which is send to you by SMS, before you can log in.

While this feature can sometimes be a nuisance (when your phone is somewhere else or the battery just died), we look forward to seing this security feature in a next version of AdminTools. 

A recent Twitter poll learned us something interesting about Joomla! and it's Editors: almost everyone serious about Joomla! uses the insanely popular JCE Editor.  And with good reason, too. This editor takes editing your content to a new level, and sets the bar for all other editors.

That being said, JCE has just raised the bar a bit more, by adding a new dimension to the "Drag and Drop uploading of images."  Previous versions of JCE already offered Drag & Drop functionality - it allowed you to drag an image (or multiple images) to a window, and they'd then be uploaded for you. But now, there's more...