I got tired of having to click through the tabs in Joomla 1.0.x to change my publishing state from unpublished to published and check the show on frontpage item everytime I posted a new article. That being said, I did a little research and figured out how to change the default settings. It requires you to modify the core joomla code, so if you patch your site to a new joomla version and they replace the file you will have to reapply this patch.  All you have to do is open the /components/com_content/content.php file and look for the $row->state variable in the editItem() function. By default it is set to 0 and you will want to change it to 1.

The $row->state variable will change the default publishing status. 0 being unpublished and 1 being published.

The $row->frontpage variable will change the default status for whether or not an item will show up on the frontpage. 0 means it will not show up on the frontpage and 1 means it will show up on the frontpage.

In my content.php file, the $row->state variable was on line 1,843 - but this may vary for you depending on the version of Joomla you are running.

I can happily say, I am back to paying for just one webhost. As I mentioned in a previous article, I was paying almost $40/month between two webhosts (1 shared + 1 VPS) and had my websites split across both of them. I recently moved all the websites on both of the old hosts over to my new Hostmonster account. Everything seems to be running fine and I even got a chance to do a little housekeeping at the same time.

I was originally paying for my brother's domains and hosting, but asked him to start paying for his domains if he wanted to keep them. Since then, he transferred his domains to GoDaddy and started paying for them. The downside to this is I no longer have control over them.  His domains were one of the main reasons I kept the oldest (shared) servers for so long. Being that I don't have control over the DNS records and it's almost been a year now that I am still paying for the shared hosting, I decided to just kill the DNS hosting and let his website go dead until he takes care of the DNS records.

Either way, I'm back to one host at a great price and so far I'm still happy with the decision.

If you are seeing this message, then you are now seeing my website served up through my new webhost, HostMonster.  I decided to switch from a VPS back to simple shared hosting.  I realized that it didn't really make sense for me to have my own server as I wasn't really taking advantage of it. It was nice to have my site load a few milliseconds faster, but it really wasn't worth the money I was spending.

For those of you who don't know, I originally was using the Business Shared Hosting from 1and1, but the servers kept getting slower and slower. Shared hosting companies are known for overloading shared boxes with more users than is necessary and I assume that's what happened.  I really liked 1and1 and was sad to see that they couldn't come up with a good solution for me. Oddly enough, almost a year later I still am paying for their service as I haven't gotten around to tranferring my brother's and other peoples sites off of the old 1and1 servers.  On the other hand, I did move my main website off of the 1and1 servers and onto a Virtual Private Server (VPS) running on VPSLink.com hardware.

It was a learning experience with VPSLink and now that it's all said and done, I learned a lot and enjoyed the experience - even though Laura might say otherwise. ;) I have decided that it doesn't make sense to pay $37 for hosting ($10 for 1and1's hosting and $27 for VPSLink) so I am finally in the process of moving all the hosts over to the new server.  I packaged up all the databases and files last night and shipped them over the wire - around 1.1 GB (gigabytes) worth of data in just over 2 minutes. The speed of the transfer was all due to one of the core requirements I have when looking at any type of hosting: Shell Access. I'll explain the details later, but it provides a lot of flexibility.

Anyway - the big thing is my main website (boshdirect) and all the subsites are moved over to HostMonster.  I'll let you know how things go!

(Next up is updating my site to Joomla 1.5)