Steve’s Blog

November 13, 2008

Come to CMS Expo to Get Ahead Of the Curve On Joomla

This is a guest blog post by by John Coonen from the CMS Association.

Silver Lining: Will Recession Sober People Up to the Value of Open Source?

Sure, it’s a morbid thought – nobody wants a recession – but it’s a reality.?

Many in the Open Source CMS world know that while Santa will surely be on a slim-fast diet when it comes to gift-giving this holiday season, the forecast for work in the Open Source CMS arena stands a chance of (dare one say) “glad tidings” in the coming months – or at least maintaining its market share.

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November 11, 2008

Joomla Installer Improvements

Here’s a quick rundown of some ways in which Joomla and third-party developers are trying to make managing your Joomla site much easier:

Automatic Updates for the Joomla 1.5 Core

Joomla Magic Updater
installs as a component and then allows you to update to the latest
Joomla version with a simple button click. The files are taken directly
from joomla.org. People seem to love it. In less than a month on the
Joomla Extensions Directory its one of the top rated extensions with
over 25 rave reviews.

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November 10, 2008

5 Reasons to be Bullish on Open Source

… or "why Open Source is like WalMart":

"The nation has two kinds of retailers these days: those bracing for a grim holiday season, and Wal-Mart … We know that Mom’s not going to cancel Christmas. We’re
committed to cutting the cost of Christmas. It’s what we do.”" (NYTimes)

I really think we’re lucky to be in the Open Source world right now. We can be the Walmart of the technology sector. As people cut back, they’re not cancelling web projects but they are looking for quality at much lower prices. Whether you’re building a business on an OS platform or if you’re a developer selling OS services, here’s 5 reasons to be bullish right now:

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November 6, 2008

Cable and Wireless Run Joomla 1.5

Back in June we made a list of all the major companies that we could find with Joomla websites. We found firms such as Avis, Danone, Mistubishi, Olympus, Porsche, Sprint, Toshiba, Vodafone and Yamaha.

Here’s one thats even bigger: Cable and Wireless’s main corporate site, CW.com. Its a very simple, professional Joomla 1.5 with only XMap as a visible extension.

CW goes back to the 1860s and was the first company to break British Telecom’s phone monopoly in the U.K. Its the main phone provider in many former British colonies and its a member of the FTSE 100 Index, making it one of the U.K.’s most highly capitalised public companies.

November 5, 2008

3 Tickets Left for Tampa and New York Joomla Classes

OK, I’ve got to admit to being pretty nervous when I announced a series of training classes back in September. Fortunately things have gone well and there’s clearly a good number of people out there who want to learn Joomla. Two classes have sold out and we have three seats left in the other cities:

Washington – SOLD OUT
New York on November 15 … 3 Seats Remaining
Tampa on November 22 … 3 Seats Remaining
Atlanta – SOLD OUT

You can use the coupon “alledia” for a $100 on both the New York and Tampa classes.

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November 3, 2008

Joomla and Social Networking

Congratulations to Drupal which won both of Packt Publishing Open Source CMS awards this year. Drupal also won last year and Joomla won in 2006. What interested me wasn’t really the decison but the explanation:

"Comments were also reserved for Drupal’s strong social applications capabilities and how it integrates seamlessly with content management."

Much as I love Joomla, I agree. Its true to say that Drupal currently offers more social networking power than Joomla. It has high-quality groups, profile, tagging and ACL features. Its also being used for higher-profile social networking projects, as Acquia show here:

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October 31, 2008

Joomla RSS Feeds for Charity

This is a guest blog post from David Towers of GoodWebPractices.com.

Today is Breast Cancer Awareness day in the UK. It’s important to be aware of breast cancer because one in nine women develop breast cancer during their lives.

To mark breast cancer awareness day – a new native Joomla 1.5 extension has been released, the Breast Cancer Awareness RSS Syndicator.

This extension was developed by the the Body Health Debate and has been created to help promote breast cancer awareness within the Joomla community.

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October 27, 2008

H1 Tags in Joomla Templates

Are h1 tags any use? At last as far as SEO experts go, there’s a lot of disagreement:

Russ Jones: “In my opinion, the second most important HTML tag available.”

Todd Malicoat: “I can’t imagine h1 tags having very much weight anymore – they’re good practice for coding valid CSS, and seperating form from function. Good to use, but not a whole lot of value on their own.”

Jill Whalen: “Keywords H tags in and of themselves don’t seem to really matter as my tests have shown that positions don’t seem to change whether the headline is wrapped in an H tag or not.”

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

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October 22, 2008

How to Write a Decent Blog Post

Forget all that advice floating about good grammar, declarative sentences, keywords in the title and all the other advice you’ve been giving about blogging. That’s just the icing on the cake.

I reckon there’s only one way to write a decent blog post …. go for a walk.

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October 16, 2008

Alledia’s Bolt is the World’s Fastest Joomla Template

This Sunday will be the 1st birthday of the Joomla SEO Club!

We’re celebrating by releasing our first extension, an SEO-optimized (are you surprised?) template called Bolt.

Bolt is named in honor of Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man, because this template loads so much faster than its rivals.

We’re not launching yet another template club, but staying based in Joomla SEO, aiming to offer you some optimized extensions.

The philisophy behind Bolt is to remove anything that stops the template from loading as quickly as possible. There are no heavy scripts, no conflicts with other extensions and we’ve even disabled Joomla’s heavy Javascript file.

Speed: So stripped down that it can make as few as 4 HTTP requests.
Lean Code: Uses only 8 images and 15kb of files.
Flexibility: 7 different background colors and 15 different module options.
Menus: It comes with both a dropdown menu and a split menu.

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