Sucuri have released a very interesting website security report detailing their analyses of 11,000+ systems made up largely of WordPress, Joomla! and Magento. These three systems make up a significant proportion of the world’s 1 billion websites, in fact over one third of the world’s websites are powered by either Wordpress, Joomla!, Magento or Drupal.

In almost all instances, the security compromises found were the result of improper deployment, configuration, and overall maintenance by the webmasters and their hosts. Most issues were due to outdated non-core extensions which had available updates solving the security issue that were never applied.

With the release of Joomla 3.5 we can now use a custom CSS file to override the styles of the default Protostar template. Using the override method by only adding our custom CSS code in the user.css file means the change will not be overwritten and lost should the template itself be updated. It's also easier to maintain with all customizations in one place.

To use the user.css file in Protostar you must create the file yourself and place it in the correct location. 

User.css location in Protostar

templates/protostar/css/user.css

The system will import the file if the file exists and is not empty, according to the official pull request. Once you have this file in place you can add customizations to override any styles used in the template or extensions. Some extensions can add CSS after a template renders, so if you're not seeing your changes, you may need to implement the !important command. 

The default layout of PDF invoices in Virtuemart for Joomla can be quite ugly, however there are some quite easy ways to add simple branding and slightly more complex ways for customizing the entire layout using the standard template override system.

The simplest things to do are to customize the header and footer areas. Typically I'll add a logo or custom header banner image to make the invoice match the rest of the branding. I also like to add some contact information in the footer such as address, customer service email and phone number and perhaps VAT ID or company registration details. Adding these things is very like editing articles in Joomla and is achieved through the two content editor areas Invoice Head and Invoice footer on the Invoices/Emails tab at Virtuemart > Shop > Shop.

Should you want to further customize the invoice area you will need to edit the file(s) at /components/com_virtuemart/views/invoice/tmpl which create various parts of the invoice. The one that creates the main body of the invoice is invoice_items.php. If you're editing these files, you should use a template override in order to retain the changes after any Virtuemart updates. When editing these files and checking your changes, you will also have to delete any PDF invoices which have already been generated in order to force a new one to generate showing your adjustments. These are stored in the Virtuemart temporary files folder which you may have customized but it by default at /vmfiles/invoices