One of the questions I hear most often on the Joomla SEO Forums and at Joomla.org is: "Will Joomla 1.5 be any better for SEO than 1.0.12?" The answer, we’re pleased to say is yes. Behind the scenes work is being put into some possible SEO changes for 1.5:
What may change in 1.5?
Those of you who have used the SEF Patch from Joomlatwork.com will recognise many of the same ideas at work. That’s because the improvements are being done by the same person – Richard from Joomlatwork. See these screenshots for a dramatic view of the potential changes:
Inside Menu Items and Content Items
http://www.joomlatwork.com/dmdocs/joomla150_frontpage_seo.jpg
You can gain control over page titles, the index/noindex tag, plus Google cache and snippet control
Inside the SEO tab in Global Configuration
http://www.joomlatwork.com/dmdocs/joomla150_seo_config.jpg
The tab has been greatly extended to include complete control over the default setting for the title tag, removal of the Joomla metatag, custom metadata fields plus Google cache and snippet control.
How does it work?
In a similar way to the SEF Patch – everything is done through XML files. With 1.5 you can define custom fields into a separated XML file so that you extend the META fields.
Where can I see this in action?
If you want to test it by yourself see the SVN repository below (the changes aren’t uploaded to 1.5 yet): http://www.joomlatwork.com/svn/joomla150_svn.zip
- Unzip the zip file
- Rename the configuration.php file into configuration.php-dist
- Retrieve the latest SVN from Joomla
- Install it and then replace all the files with the files within the zip file.
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