Dodging the Bullets - A Disaster Preparation Guide for Joomla
Canavan, Tom. (2007). Dodging the Bullets: A Disaster Preparation Guide for Joomla! Web Sites. New York: iUniverse.
For those of us who are seasoned developers, we know how commonplace it is for new site owners to think that the hard work is over once the new site is live. And we know how far from the truth that is. This book is designed to help site owners think about mission-critical issues shortly before or immediately after their new site goes live. My personal recommendation: get this book in the hands of your site owner as soon as possible. The sooner the development team can plan for backups, site monitoring and other maintenance issues the better.
Overall, this job does a nice job outlining what site owners need to know about developing maintenance practices, implementing processes and procedures for both backup and restoration, and preparing for other issues that might arise.
Where this book exels is in a combination of the checklists and forms that it makes available to site owners. Because so much of a Joomla site is configurable, it's easy to make changes that aren't ideal, or may even put your site at risk. Canavan covers everything from managing configuration, to how to use your .htaccess file to help protect your site, and setting proper permissions. Even those who aren't familiar with UNIX and chmod should find this accessible, useful information.
Once set, security items like those described above need only occassional review. The work, however, isn't finished. Canavan then moves on to maintenance, breaking tasks into weekly, monthly and other timeframes. Depending upon your particular environment, he also provides a number of supporting forms so that work may be documented. One of the most useful sets of forms in the entire book are those that allow site owners to capture information about their core Joomla install, components, modules and plug-ins. More importantly, because Joomla is open source, Canavan also provides forms for capturing and describing any custom code on the site. If you're working with a support team that didn't also develop your original site, this information is vital.
This book isn't rocketscience, nor should it be: it encourages site owners to carefully plan for issues that inevitably arise. At approximately $30, if this book helps you avert even one disaster with a site, it will be well worth the investment.