Joomla 1.5

Dirty Socks

Migrating to Joomla 1.5

Dirty SocksHopefully you noticed … we finally migrated this site to Joomla 1.5.

It took two months of planning and then two weeks of solid work to do the migration. Why so long? The Joomla core team have done their job but third-party developers are terrible at explaining how to move their extensions from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5. Even those that bothered to write instructions still hide them as if it was their dirty socks.

So, in the hope it will save someone else sometime, here are the migration instructions you’ll have a hard time finding elsewhere:

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Joomla Survey

The Power of Twitter and User Feedback

Joomla SurveyWow, I’ve finally realised how much Twitter is taking over. This morning’s post on the “Top Ten Things To Explain To Joomla Learners” created a lot of comments and feedback, but it was all on Twitter. Actually leaving a comment on the post seems suddenly to be out-of-date. With this trend, it can’t be long before Tweetbacks start appearing on Joomla as well as WordPress.

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Joomla 1.5 RSS feeds - Breast cancer awareness

Joomla RSS Feeds for Charity

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

Joomla 1.5 RSS feeds - Breast cancer awareness

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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Fireboard Forums

Where Have the Joomla Forums Gone?

Fireboard ForumThere has been an interesting update to the forum sections on the Joomla Extensions Directory. It has been split into Native Joomla Forums and Forum Bridges. 

I was shocked to see only five native Joomla forums remaining. There are two native forums with a wide range of features:

And three very basic forums:

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Joomla 1.5 RSS

Full Site RSS Feeds on Joomla 1.5

Joomla 1.5 RSSNo doubt about it, RSS feeds on 1.5 are better than they were on 1.0. Not perfect, but certainly better.

Instead of a single feed, the 1.5 RSS feed that appears in the browser bar is always changing because it shows only the articles on that page. You can see a good example at http://community.joomla.org.

This did lead to one problem I found the other day … its sometimes difficult to produce a full RSS feed for all the articles on your site.

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SEO Comparison of Joomla 1.0 and 1.5

After the big chart earlier this week comparing the Search Engine Friendly URL Components for Joomla, I wanted to take a similar approach and compare the SEO features of Joomla 1.0 and 1.5.

What’s On the Chart? 

On the chart is a rundown of all the key on-page SEO factors. We can’t help you when it comes to building links or writing articles people want to read, but we can advise on the technical stuff.

Who May Find This Useful

Hopefully this chart will help people who:

  • are thinking about upgrading to 1.5
  • want an easy reference chart for SEO improvements in 1.0 or 1.5

The Small Print

  • The factors are heavily based on SEOMoz’s Google Search Engine Ranking Factors because it does a good job of combining the wisdom of many experts.
  • The list is more-or-less in the order of importance given by the SEOMoz team. Page titles are much important than duplicate content for example.
  • The Joomla 1.0 codebase has been around for at least 3/4 years, whereas 1.5 is still Release Candidate. Of course it has less available extensions.
  • Some important on-page SEO factors have been left out, notable keywords in body text, bold print and h2 or h3 titles. This is because they can just be done with any WYSIWYG editor.
  • I’m sure that plugins will emerge to cover all the current holes in 1.5. Give it time. However, if SEO is really important to you and thinking that you should wait before using 1.5 … you’re right.

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Great SEO Improvements in Joomla 1.5

 One of the questions I hear most often on the Joomla SEO Forums and at Joomla.org is: "Will Joomla 1.5 be any better for SEO than 1.0.12?" The answer, we’re pleased to say is yes. Behind the scenes work is being put into some possible SEO changes for 1.5:

What may change in 1.5?

Those of you who have used the SEF Patch from Joomlatwork.com will recognise many of the same ideas at work. That’s because the improvements are being done by the same person – Richard from Joomlatwork. See these screenshots for a dramatic view of the potential changes:

Inside Menu Items and Content Items

http://www.joomlatwork.com/dmdocs/joomla150_frontpage_seo.jpg

You can gain control over page titles, the index/noindex tag, plus Google cache and snippet control

Inside the SEO tab in Global Configuration

http://www.joomlatwork.com/dmdocs/joomla150_seo_config.jpg

The tab has been greatly extended to include complete control over the default setting for the title tag, removal of the Joomla metatag, custom metadata fields plus Google cache and snippet control.

How does it work?

In a similar way to the SEF Patch – everything is done through XML files. With 1.5 you can define custom fields into a separated XML file so that you extend the META fields.

Where can I see this in action?

If you want to test it by yourself see the SVN repository below (the changes aren’t uploaded to 1.5 yet): http://www.joomlatwork.com/svn/joomla150_svn.zip

  • Unzip the zip file
  • Rename the configuration.php file into configuration.php-dist

    •  or

  • Retrieve the latest SVN from Joomla
  • Install it and then replace all the files with the files within the zip file.
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