Steve’s Blog

June 14, 2006

“Mastering Mambo” – New Book About the Mambo CMS

{amazon_product}1904811515{/amazon_product}"Mastering Mambo" is a new book for people running and building websites with the Mambo Content Management System., It was written in an awkward time, when the Mambo CMS was in the process of splitting from Joomla, but because the codebases of both projects is still so similar, "Mastering Mambo" is a relevant book for both Mambo and Joomla users. Initially, I was a little confused about the target audience for this volume. The same publisher (Packt) also has a book called "Building Websites with Mambo" that would be more appropriate than for Mambo beginners. The authors, Tobias Hauser and…

May 16, 2006

How to Sell on the Web

E-commerce has been around for more than 15 years now and people are increasingly comfortable opening their wallets online. However, I still come across a lot of websites that are a real turn-off to customers. Hopefully yours isn‚Äôt one of them, but just in case, here are my top four hints for making your website sleek, speedy and secure: 1) You need an SSL. That stands for ‚ÄúSecure Socket Layer‚Äù. What does it mean? It means that a special form of encryption is used to protect the details of everyone who sends you information via your website. If you go…

May 4, 2006

How to Make a Killer Real Estate Website

In March, I talked about the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org), which is one of the most important places on the web to get your site listed. It is also one of the most difficult. In fact, a few people wrote to me after the article came out and agreed that it had been almost impossible for them to get listed in the Open Directory. Several of these people were realtors and when I was doing some research to help them out, I ran across this statement from someone who judges sites for the OD: ‚Äúthere is one type of site that…

April 22, 2006

Interview with Emir Sakic from Sakic.net

Today we’re delighted to have?a chance to talk with Emir Sakic from Sakic.Net. Emir has been?a member of Joomla’s core development team from the project start.?He is also the developer of SEF Advance which was the first component to provide Search Engine Friendly URLs for Mambo, the precursor?of Joomla!

April 21, 2006

How to use PunLA

Some quick tips and tricks to get you started with the PunLA forum: PunLa installs like any other component. Simply click and upload. Login as Super-Administrator and the admin options will appear at the top of the forum. Make sure you have the correct version – PunLA (for Joomla) or PunBO (for Mambo). Only seems to work with localhost database currently. Make sure that everyone registering with your site uses the PunLA sign-up module. Unpublish the standard login module. The forum has a very clever skinning option here, although PunLA doesn’t yet guarantee that styles other than Vershire will work.…

April 13, 2006

Web 2.0

Lately, there has been a lot of buzz about something confusingly called Web 2.0. It made its debut on the front of Time and Newsweek in March, but it still seems somewhat obscure to people I talk with. Does it come in a box? What was wrong with the old web? What‚Äôs different about this new version? Bear with me for two minutes, while I try to explain. When I was a kid I loved to read a lot of books. Looking back I have to be honest and admit that most of them were pretty forgettable, plodding novels –…

April 6, 2006

Joomla URL Week Part 6 – Conclusions

In Parts 1 and 2 of our survey, we talked about default Joomla URLs and default Joomla SEF URLs. We decided that both were poor choices for a website. Fortunately, over the next three days we analyzed the three components that allow you to produce Search Engine Friendly URL and found that each one offered potentially significant improvements. Today, its time to answer the question: "What is the best URL setup for Joomla and why?"

April 5, 2006

Joomla URL Week Part 5 – SEF Advance Review

SEF Advance is the granddaddy of SEF URL extensions for Joomla, having been around for nearly three and a half years now. It is also the only one of three that is sold instead of being released for free under the GNU/GPL license. In the fifth part of Joomla URL Week, we’ll review SEF Advance and find out how it compares to Artio SEF and Open SEF.

April 3, 2006

Joomla URL Week Part 4 – Open SEF Review

Although we are reviewing OpenSEF because of its ability to create Search Engine Friendly URLs for Joomla, this extension has many more features. This component is a whole suite of SEO tools that include scripts to create Google Site Maps, manage URLs for multiple sites and check for thing such as broken links, Google Page Rank and keyword density. Does such a wide-ranging feature set make OpenSEF the best choice for Joomla SEO, or does it simply make it bloated? Read our review and find out….

March 23, 2006

LunarPages

Name Logo Cost Space Bandwidth Other Reviews LunarPages $6.95 1500 GB 15000 GB Click to go back to main Joomla hosting page Please feel free to leave your experience of LunarPages hosting below: Do they keep their websites running reliably? Do they answer customer support questions quickly and successfully? Would you recommend other Joomla users host with them? Click here to see a review of all Joomla hosting companies.