One of the most? frequently asked questions on the Joomla forums is “What is the Itemid and what does it do?”. Its something that frustrates even experienced developers … witness the post called “Damn you, infernal item IDs!!!” on WhyJoomla.com. I thought a quick tutorial would be useful and along the way we can break down other aspects of Joomla URLs.
We’re delighted to announce the launch of Joomla South East, which is one of a growing number of Joomla User Groups around the world. We aim to have our first meeting(s) in Atlanta but also to reach out to current and potential Joomla users around the South East of the United States. If you’re interested, please sign up at JoomlaSouthEast.com. Then you can go to the forum and help us work out where and when we can first meet as Joomla South East!
Today saw the end of something that has bugged me for a whole year – our Yellow Pages contract. Wow, that’s an expensive, useless heap of nothing for a webdesign company. After two years of growing the company, mainly by word-of-mouth, this time last year I decided that we might be able to expand our local customer base by advertising in the Yellow Pages. I was wrong – embarrasingly so. We have had precisely five calls. None of those people were doing anything more than trying to find out general pricing.
People signing up at Alledia in weeks to come are going to have one extra field to fill in. Recently, we’ve seen a sharp jump in the number of fake registrations and so over the weekend we added a captcha to our registration form. This problem isn’t growing because Joomla or Community Builder have security problems, but it can be simply explained by what we’ll call "Spam’s Law": The amount of spam a software product receives is directly proportional to its popularity.
Regular readers of my blog must think I’m going at bit cuckoo of late, repeatedly quoting from a 20-year old book written by a guy born in 1911. No apologies – David Ogilvy’s book “Ogilvy on Advertising” is a classic. The man himself spent more time in the research department than on the creative team during his early years. He developed an heavier reliance on research and hard data than almost all his competitors:
Hi All Apologies for skipping the regular post today – we’ve been busy moving all our company and clients sites to a dedicated server. Some of our clients run sports sites and are about to get hit hard by traffic from March Madness (something I’m still learning to understand and love as a Brit) and others are also doing really well, growing steadily on a month-to-month basis. It was time to upgrade our hosting capacity. Thanks to the following people whose speedy help made the move much easier: Chris at Rochen.com Emir at Sakic.net Bernhard at XHTMLSuite.com We’ll be back…
As reported in earlier posts (launch post, first update and second update) we’re running a test comparing the search engine optimization capabilites of Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. We created three sites, Jabalpur.net.in (WordPress) Amritsar.net.in (Drupal) and Vadodara.net.in (Joomla). Each website was created with a similar amount of content, similar Overture results and a similar domain name. Within two weeks the WordPress site was so far ahead that it looked as if they competition was over. Slowly however, Drupal and Joomla have recovered until they now lead the pack. The Joomla site now has 5 top ten rankings in every search…
Five things to consider before adding social networking features to your site, or even more seriously, launching a 100% social networking site: It is absurdly difficult to monetize even a very successful social networking site. Facebook has a click-through rate on its ads of 0.04%. That means they need 1 million page views to generate 400 clicks. If those clicks bring in 40 cents each, they’re looking at 1 million page views just to earn $100. MySpace has a CTR (click-through rate) of 0.10%, which is equally useless. The problem is that people who spend a lot of time on…
Its great to see people in the Joomla community taking the time and effort to build free sites that are genuninely useful resources. Today, I’ll highlight two of the very best: Joomla24.com Back in the Mambo days, when I was first investigating Mambo there was one place go to in order to find quality, free templates – Mambohut.com. I spent many hours learning how to design for Mambo by downloading and tearing apart designs from that site. Since the move to Joomla, that site hasn’t been update very regularly and so its great so see a new site provide such…
MoonRay, one of the developers over at Joomlaspan.com has been developing a lot of useful tools for Joomla. We use his Google Translation module on the right side of our site, and it really gets a lot of heavy usage. He uses the Simple Machines-Joomla Bridge on his site and has been kind enough to publish a tutorial, explaining how to overcome metadata problems caused by the integration. You can see the results live at Joomlaspan. Click here to read Moonray’s tutorial.