Cloaking Your Joomla Installation from Users

We want to hide the face that we are using Joomla.  It is just a security precaution.  The fact is, Joomla is an often hacked site.  For this reason we don't want to advertise to the world that we are using Joomla.  So, there are two things we want to do to help cloak Joomla.

1. Hide the admin URL.
2. Remove the Generator Code in the HTML.

Part1.  Hiding the Joomla Administrator login.

This is the easy part.  We simple install jSecure Authentication.  This plugin will allow you to add a security key at the end of the URL.  For example, www.trainmejoomla.com/administrtor/?secretkey.

If a user simply types in www.trainmejoomla.com/administrtor, the default admin URL, they will be redirected to another page you can specify.

UPDATE:

The plugin is now commercial.  $4.99 - Still a great deal

Part 2. Remove Meta Tag Generator!

Although you never see it... this is a very easy way to see if a website is built using Joomla.  Look at yours.  Look at your code (view -> page source) and search:

<meta name="Generator" content="Joomla! - Copyright (C) 2005 - 2006 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved." />

If you find it you want to remove it and here is how.

Locate the file: /libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer/head.php

There is a line of code in there that builds the generator.  We want to comment it out.  Search the head.php file for: <meta name="generator" content=.  That will show you where in the file it is.  Joomla 1.5.9 it is located at line 83. Just comment this line out with: //

It will look something like this:

//$strHtml .= $tab.'<meta name="generator" content="'.$document->getGenerator().'" />'.$lnEnd;

Save and then upload the file.  Test it and make sure everything is ok and that the generator is gone.

P.S. Any time you make a file modification... make a back-up of the file you modify. Some SEO Components like sh404sef will also hide the Meta tag generator.