Steve’s Blog

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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The Best Content Versioning in Joomla

gcr_prod_boxDuring 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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British Telecom Rolling Out Joomla To Customers

British Telecom JoomlaWe 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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Joomla Classes in the U.K.: London and Cambridge

London JoomlaIt 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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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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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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What’s Happening With Joomla?

pressureListen.. 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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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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Joomla Classes in Nashville and Charlotte

Joomla NashvilleAlledia is based down in the south of the United States in Atlanta. We started our Joomla training classes here and by the end of June we’ll have run almost a dozen Atlanta classes.

Its time to spread the Joomla gospel (the Jospel?) a little further around the south so early next week we’re headed to Charlotte, North Carolina and the Music City of Nashville, Tennessee. We’ll be in Charlotte on Monday 8, and Nashville on Tuesday 9.

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Thoughts From Two Weeks Away

In the last two weeks I’ve been in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Washington, New York and even Alaska. Just one more short trip to Charlotte and Nashville left.

The trip taught me something. For two weeks I kept in touch via email and cellphone but had no time for three things I’d been using every day. Two of them I really missed, the other … not so much.

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