Steve’s Blog

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.

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:

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.

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…

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.

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…

October 16, 2008

Joomla SEO Templates

Breeze – the World’s Easiest Joomla Template It’s named “Breeze” because it’s so speedy and lightweight and because installing is a “breeze”. Here’s how to set it up: Install Joomla Upload Breeze Upload your logo Enjoy your template! It’s that easy! Besides all the simplicity, this also a ridiculously fast template. Depending on how it?s configured, it can use as little as 4 HTTP requests and 15kb between CSS, graphics, and HTML. 6 different color options 12 different module options Compressed, lightweight CSS Only 2 images, both highly optimized Bolt – the World’s Fastest Joomla Template The Bolt template is…

October 15, 2008

Joomla Code Commits vs Drupal and WordPress

Someone mentioned to me this week that they were worried about Joomla because not much work was being done on the project’s code. To reassure them I headed over to Ohloh.net which keeps useful data on the amount of work done on open source projects. What I found was that work on Joomla proceeds very differently from both Drupal and WordPress: Where as those projects are built incrementally with small changes, Joomla has great bursts of energy followed by relatively quiet periods. We’re just on of those plateaus now as the project gets ready for Joomla 1.6. Joomla has had…

October 14, 2008

Official Support Will End for Joomla 1.0

Official support for Joomla 1.0 will end in 281 days. That announcement was made by Wilco Jansen on joomla.org. July 22, 2009 will be the two year anniversary of the first Joomla 1.5 release, and it seems an appropriate day to move forward. I’m sure this is a popular decision within the Joomla team and also with third-party devs who can concentrate on developing for just one version. Mathias from JoomlaTools was one person pushing for this to happen. It’s probably less popular with the thousands of people who still use Joomla 1.0. However, there’s no reason to get worried.…

October 9, 2008

Hitting the Open Source Wall

Hitting the wall: “In endurance sports, particularly cycling and running, hitting the wall describes the condition when an athlete suddenly loses energy“. (via Wikipedia) Hitting the open source wall: “In building a project, particularly when giving it away free, hitting the wall describes the condition when an project suddenly loses energy“. (via me)