Steve’s Blog

July 17, 2009

Bolt – the World’s Fastest Joomla Template

Bolt and Breeze have moved.

They are now available exclusively to members of OSTraining.com.

In addition to Bolt and Breeze, you’ll get great Joomla training classes and world-class Joomla support.

The Bolt template is like nothing you’ve ever seen before in Joomla!

Named in honor of Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man, it loads in a fraction of the time of its rivals.

Despite all the extra flexibility, this is the most optimized template ever made. Depending on how it?s configured, it can use as little as 4 HTTP requests and 15kb between CSS, graphics, and HTML.

7 different color options
15 different module options
Compressed, lightweight CSS
Only 8 images, all optimize

No hidden links
No bloated code
No conflicts with other extensions
No complex setup

Our goal is simplicity. We offer a 100% money-back guarantee if your copy of Bolt has script conflicts with any Joomla extension.

July 15, 2009

NewOrleans.com Runs Joomla

We uncovered some other large geo-sites using Joomla including SanDiego.com and TimesSquare.com but I have a new favorite: NewOrleans.com.

Back in 2006 the site was rebuilt in Joomla by a company called Silicon Chisel who gave a detailed rundown on the move. Not all of those pieces are still in place but the core of the site is still Joomla and I think its a very effective, professional set-up.

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July 9, 2009

Joomla 1.6 and SEO

If you haven’t done so already, you need to head to Joomlacode.org and download Andrew Eddie’s presentation on Joomla 1.6. Its also on video at Vimeo. After reading, I’m more encouraged about Joomla’s future than I have been for months.

The presentation has 39 detailed slides, so I won’t try to recap them all – look for that in a blog post next week. Today, I’ll focus on what’s important from an SEO perspective:

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July 7, 2009

The Best Content Versioning in Joomla

During the last few weeks I’ve been working on taking our Joomla training classes online and we’ve been sending out a free weekly newsletter with Joomla tips and tricks. Last week, I decided to spend some time answering two really common questions:

“What happens if someone makes a mistake in an article? How can we roll back to a previous version?”
“We have a legal requirement to track the articles that appear on our website – how do we do that?”

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June 28, 2009

British Telecom Rolling Out Joomla To Customers

We had a student at our Cambridge class who put me on this trail of this … apparently British Telecom are rolling out Joomla for nearly all of their customers’ websites. With the exception of e-commerce,it seems to be their default system for building customer sites. For those of you not familiar with BT, it is far and away the biggest telecom company in the U.K.

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June 15, 2009

Joomla Classes in the U.K.: London and Cambridge

London Joomla It is that time of the year again … I’m headed back the U.K. for a couple of weeks.

Mainly the trip will be family-orientated as I’ve sisters who are graduating, getting married and having babies. There’s a lot to catch up on!

However, it’s a rare vacation nowadays that doesn’t involve Joomla in some way. So we’re holding two Joomla training classes, one in Cambridge on June 25th and another in London on July 1st.

Both classes will be identical to the ones we run in the U.S. with the same materials, resources, price and even the same bad wisecracks. I may just have to edit the Powerpoints a little to replace somes “z”s with “s”s and find some Essex jokes to replace the Redneck ones.

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June 15, 2009

SEO Template Presentation from Joomla Day Netherlands

Joomla Day Netherlands took place this weekend and by all accounts it was a great success.

There was the official release for Joomla’s new Resources Directory, a presentation with useful security tips by Brian Teeman, and a really good overview of how to create a Joomla SEO-optimized template:

Rene Kreijveld from Webcreatives.nl does a great job of explaining how to create a basic source-ordered template. “Source-ordered” essentially means putting the unique, original text on a page higher up in the code, so that search engines don’t have to wade through lines and lines of repetitive code before reaching tha text. I’d recommend viewing the slides in full-screen as some of the code displayed is small (click the icon on the bottom, second from the right):

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June 10, 2009

What’s Your Favorite Joomla Analogy?

People who teach Joomla know they feeling … things have been going well, but suddenly there’s a blank look. The student’s stuck on one point. You’ve tried a few ways to explain it, but they’re not getting the big picture. You rack your brain and start, “well, Joomla’s just like a … ” and you try to dig out a comparison.

Here are my top five favorite analogies to help people grasp Joomla’s key concepts. Please feel free to post your own in the comments.

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June 8, 2009

What’s Happening With Joomla?

Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
“Yo Mos, what’s gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?”
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, “You know what’s gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever’s happening with us”
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it’s some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople.”

Lyrics from Fear Not of Man by Mos Def

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June 5, 2009

Are Smart Companies Now Supporting Several CMS Platforms?

I’m always on the lookout for business trends in our industry and I’ve spotted a significant new one in recent months. Increasingly CMS companies are supporting different platforms. The choice for each company is different, but the trend seems real:

Examples of Joomla Companies Supporting Other Platforms

Rockettheme: Joomla and phpBB3
Joomlart: Joomla and Magento
JoomlaJunkie: Working on ProThemer.com and building for Joomla, Drupal and Magento
JoomlaPraise: Working on CMSMarket.com
CMSExpo: Started with Joomla and expanded to all kinds of Open Source CMS

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