So, in the previous two videos, we've created this contact form for our Web site,
and it's sitting here right now, and you can fill it out, and send e-mails with it.
It's on your local computer, and those of you at least who are running WAMP, if
you fill this out, and you try to send yourself an e-mail, you'll get an error.
That's because your local computer is not configured to send e-mail.
When you put this up on the server, this form will send e-mail just fine, but it's
not going to work on your local computer.
One of the problems, though, once we finally get this web-site out, and on a server
is that this form is not locked down, and that pretty much anything can come
through, and fill it out, and send e-mails,
meaning robots, and spammers, and all kinds of other things.
A common way that people are using these days to prevent that from happening is
something called Captcha.
And Captcha is a funny little code that you type in, that only humans can read
that code, and match that to letters, whereas robots, and spammers, and so forth
have issues with matching up the code with the letters.
So we're going to go ahead and add one of these to the Web site, and this happens
to be built into Joomla,
and it's very straightforward process.
So I'm going to show you how that works right now.
Here inside of the back-end of Joomla,
what I'm going to do to start with is I'm going to go to Extensions > Plug-in
Manager, and I'm going to find the thing here called Captcha-ReCaptcha, and I'm
going to go ahead and click on that.
And this first screen is just going to give us some information about it, but
one of the things that it says here in the description is that the Captcha
plug-in is using ReCaptcha to prevent spammers, and so forth.
And where you can get the codes that you need to make this work is at this
address: at google.com/recaptcha.
So I'm going to go ahead and click that link. It will open this in a new tab,
and I would like to use this on my site, so I'm going to go ahead and click on
that, and it will give you some information about it.
I'm going to click on Sign up Now, and it's going to ask me for my Google login,
so I'm going to go ahead and type that in.
So, once I log in with my Google account, -- and hopefully you have a Google account;
if you don't just sign up for Gmail, and you'll have a Google account that you
can use to sign up for this service --
what you can do now is enter the Domain name for your Web site. This is where
your Web site will be when it launches, and our Web site will be at
joomla.kinetecoinc.com.
And what I want to do is Enable this key on all domains, a global key, and then
I'm going to say Create Key.
And this is going to give me two funny looking strings here.
One is the Public Key, and one is the Private Key, and I'm going to need both of
these to configure Captcha.
So here inside the back-end of Joomla,
under Basic Options, it's going to ask me for a Public Key, and a Private Key.
So all I need to do now is copy these.
Here is the Public Key, and by the way, your public key will probably look different.
Ctrl+C or Command+C to Copy, Ctrl+V or Command+V to Paste, and do the same
thing for the Private Key highlight it, Ctrl+C or Command+C to Copy, Ctrl+V or
Command+V to Paste.
This will ask you for the Theme; by default it's called Clean.
It's a very simple looking Captcha, but you can have some other color
themes here as well;
White, BlackGlass, or Red. Depending on what matches your template, you can choose
one of those other ones, and I'm going to go ahead and say Save & Close.
So now that I have the plug-in configured, now we need to tell Joomla
to use that particular plug-in, and to do that I'm going to go back to
System > Global Configuration, and here inside of Global Configuration, right here
on the Site tab is the Default Captcha, and right now there's None Selected.
I'm going to set this to Captcha-ReCaptcha, and say Save & Close.
Now what will happen is, when I go to the front-end of my Web site, and I hit
Refresh, I'll see the Captcha code appear down here at the bottom of the screen.
And every time I refresh the page, a different code is going to come up, just
like that, and so I can type in any of those combinations; whatever shows up on
the screen, I just type that on in, and everything is great.
This Captcha plug-in will show on the bottom of all of your contact forms, by default.
It will also show up at the bottom of any user registration forms that you
might have available on the front-end of the Web site, and we actually do have that right now.
If you go to the Login link down at the bottom, and it says Don't have an
account? If you click that, you'll see that we have a form here for creating a
new account on this Joomla
Web site, and the Captcha code appears at the bottom of this.
Now, this User Registration form, I'm going to go through in more detail in another video.
It is possible to turn off registration for your whole Web site, but we haven't
touched this yet, and by default, Joomla
allows a user registration form to exist on the Web site, because I created a
login form many, many videos ago.
So you'll see Captcha appear, then, associated with contact forms, and associated
with the User Registration form.