Steve’s Blog

January 31, 2007

GroupJive.org – Joomla’s Vital Social Networking Component

Am the only one who failed to notice the rebirth of a potentially very, very important Joomla component? GroupJive.org is a Community Builder add-on that gives: registered users the capability to create and moderate their own groups. There are currently three types of groups which can be created: Open, Private, and Invite only. After GroupJive.com slowly faded away last year, the project looked dormant. However, GroupJive.org launched very quietly on December 30th, 2006, and it has the potential to make a huge splash in the Joomla world. Why is this component so useful? It allows users to form and moderate…

January 29, 2007

VirtueMart Sometimes Causes SEO Problems

Be careful with Virtuemart and your efforts at Search Engine Optimization. We had an SEO client during January who suffered from an odd problem that has overtaken 2,800 pages according to a Google search. It seems that VirtueMart sometimes appends a random set of characters to the end of URLs in other parts of the site. It might be a content page, another component or a static content item, but it can happen to all of them and then end up looking like this: mydomain.com The problem is easy to miss because the normal URLs work without any problems. The…

January 29, 2007

Interview with Phil Braddock from SalsaInternet.com.au

For the fourth interview of our series, we’re delighted to welcome Phil Braddock, the Internet Marketing specialist from Salsa Internet in Brunswick, Australia. Phil took our questionss and ran with them producing a wealth of useful SEO tips and tricks for Joomla! 1. Hi Phil. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background? Hi Steve. Firstly, thanks for the opportunity to be interviewed! My background is in IT Web Systems design, and architecture, and also a bunch of IT Management roles. I started my career in online Directories working for Sensis,…

January 29, 2007

Get a new password with just your email

Two posts today, because I wanted some good news to counteract the problems with Virtuemart mentioned in the post below. Early this week we found a great little hack, built by benneh over at the Joomla.org forum. It allows people to get a new password without having to remember their username. People nearly always forget their username and so this makes it much more likely that people will return to your site if they no longer have their details. You can see it in action by clicking here: You can download it by clicking here.

January 26, 2007

Don’t be Afraid of PayPal with Joomla

A few weeks back, we blogged companies that had bad image problems and how they responded to those results appearing in the search engines. Some such as Hewlett Packard were able to shake off the bad press, but for others such as Registerfly.com and PayPal.com negative news was only a click away. Search for PayPal in Google, or Yahoo and you’ll find the following sites in the top-10 search results: Paypalsucks.com Paypalwarning.com Outofthedark.com/CorporateWars/PayPal/ If you haven’t seen these sites before, go and have a look around. I want you to realise that I’m saying the following with my…

January 25, 2007

How Long Should a Website Take to Build?

I met with a client a couple of weeks ago who admitted that his knowledge of the internet was more or less zero, yet he managed to make me rethink the way we handle a lot of our website projects. Now this guy is a Baby Boomer and has spent most of his life dealing with patients in his health practice and very, very little on the computer. He asked me to come in for a meeting and after a while I agreed that we’d build a website for his company. We started to discuss the specifics of the agreement…

January 24, 2007

10 Easy Ways to Professionalise Your Joomla Site

We’ll begin with 5 ways to make your Joomla site as professional as possible: Create a new favicon.ico. Yes, the default black Joomla logo is cute, but people bookmarking your site they need to see something that identifies your site rather than Joomla. If you don’t want to design on a 16×16 pixels scale, there are sites that will generate a favicon for you. Then upload it to your images folder. Make sure you backup your database everyday. We recommend the JomBackup Daily MySQL backup plugin. Don’t cut and paste from Microsoft Word. It may be easy but Word produces…

January 23, 2007

Open Source Projects Not Really Open?

(After reading this post, please scroll down to the comments section where there is a response to these issues from the founder of Moodle.) Over the last few weeks a debate has been running over at the Joomla forum about how to license the Joomla name and logo for websites supporting the Joomla project. The discussion wound up with the following point from Johan Janssens, the lead developer: If you wish to use the logo on any commercial product then your usage of the logo must be approved. In general permission will be given providing that your usage of the…

January 21, 2007

Interview with Andy Milller from RocketTheme

This week we’re delighted to welcome Andy Miller from RocketTheme.com to the interview chair. Andy founded and runs Joomla’s largest template club with over 13,000 members. Oh, and in his spare time he has found time to be the creator of: The templates on Joomla.org and OpenSourceMatters.com “Solarflare” which is the default theme for the current version of Joomla! MilkyWay which will be new default for Joomla! 1.5 1) Hi Andy. Could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you come to Joomla? What’s your background? Well, I’ve been involved in web development since my days in University…

January 19, 2007

Using Firefox to Help Clients

One of the first things we do when working with new clients is ask them to install Firefox. Originally this we did this because we wanted them to get into the habit of viewing their site in both IE and Firefox when making changes, because those are the most popular browsers. Recently, Firefox has been the beneficiary of so many great extensions that we’re now starting to use the browser to help interested clients learn more about Search Engine Optimization and even make CSS changes to their sites. Once Firefox is in place, we also help them to…