Yesterday Pierre (aka LaFrance) approached me about making a possible change to the Joomla admin feed module to display the Joomla security feed which highlights vulnerable Joomla extensions. To be honest although we released our own Joomla admin theme which changes the whole Joomla admin experience, I rarely dig into the other functionality available in the admin and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to use the core feed module as it is.

The following is a little tweak to the Joomla admin configuration for anyone who wants to keep abreast of official security reports from the Joomla team in regards to 3rd party extension vulnerabilities.

You can read the official Joomla announcement for this new feature here.

1. Login to your Joomla administrator ie www.joomla.com/administrator

2. Navigate to extensions > module manager then click on the sub menu item for administrator modules.

3. Edit the Mod_feed module or if you dont have an instance of the mod_feed created already you can create a new instance by clicking on new and then selecting the mod_feed type of module.

4. There are a few options available in the feed module as per the screenshot below but the most important is the feed url.

There are also a number of different feeds that can be displayed for Joomla security so it might mean that you will need to publish multiple feed modules. You can enter either of the following urls in the feed url parameter:

http://feeds.joomla.org/JoomlaSecurityVulnerableExtensions

This feed below relates to the Joomla security Team announcements and does not carry Vulnerable Extension List information.

feed://feeds.joomla.org/JoomlaSecurityNews

1. I prefer a pretty lean output so I would recommend disabling images and intro for the feed itself and just display the feed titles. Depending on your needs 10 is probably a nice round number to display.

2. If you are using the default Kephri or our Simpla template then the best module position to display this feed in is the cpanel position although in some cases it might work just as well in the icon position.

3. Next you need to do then is to make sure that the module is published and is set to display first in the cpanel module ordering.

4. Once that is done navigate to the control panel in the admin and you should see the security feed published to the accordion on the Joomla admin login screen.

Here is a screenshot of how it looks in Simpla:

* Ive just updated the screenshots to reflect the new feed settings - its worth noting that the feed count with this rss feed relates to the number of months being displayed rather than the individual entries being displayed.

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