Joomla News

This was the third year of the CMS Expo in Chicago and it took another leap forward. Rather than getting lost in downtown or suburban Chicago they’ve moved to the suburb of Evanston, right on the lake and next to Northwestern University. It’s a good fit for a conference of 300 to 400 people.

Was it worth going? Absolutely. I’ve only missed one Expo out of the four and wouldn’t make that mistake again. Here’s what stood out to me this year:

• More Drupal and other CMSs. Although the people and sponsors were at least 50% Joomla, this was the first time that it became a true CMS event. Drupal was there in a big way. WordPress were disappointingly absent as their Wordcamp San Francisio coincided with the event, but a host of other smaller CMSs attended.

• Cloud, cloud, cloud. We had the sponsors’ booth next to Acquia and I couldn’t help but notice that they promoted Drupal Gardens almost to the exclusion of their other products. I’m not sure whether that’s because they thought it was the best fit for this audience, but it was hard to avoid the cloud everywhere I went. CloudAccess were getting ready to launch demo.joomla.org and lots of other companies had cloud-hosting products.

• An industry is growing. Many companies still only support one CMS which means we currently have lots of separate industries. However, nearly all the companies in attendance realised that smart companies are now supporting several CMS platforms.

• CMS Expo broke even for the first time. These events are always expensive and risky so that was a big step forward to ensuring the Expo’s long-term stability.

  Continue reading “Recap of CMS Expo 2010”

The Joomla team is happy to announce that they’re moving beyond T-shirts, hoodies and bags.

They’ve decided that the Joomla community needs a sexier and more athletic way to show their love for Joomla.

So say hello to the “Joola-Hoop”.

Joomla has even been lucky enough to launch with a famous celebrity endorsement with Michelle Obama doing the Joola-Hoop dance on the White House lawn.

Oh, and for you male geeks who aren’t sure if this product is right for you, we’ve been able to combine all your favorite things in just one irresistible photo:

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 H tag or not.”

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Continue reading “H1 Tags in Joomla Templates”

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 over four times more code contributions than it’s rivals, in a much shorter period of time.

• Joomla page on Ohloh
• Drupal page on Ohloh
• WordPress page on Ohloh

Continue reading “Joomla Code Commits vs Drupal and WordPress”

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. Personally I’ve made so many hacks and modifications to Alledia.com that we’ll probably never upgrade. We build all our new websites with 1.5, but see no reason to upgrade existing installations. You can expect several Joomla developers to fill the gap of providing 1.0 support while the core team keeps pushing ahead.

Happy Birthday Joomla!

September 1st is the project’s 3rd birthday. You can read the original announcement from 2005 here.

Only 10 days previously the domain name had been registered alongside several other alternatives that the team were considering.

How far has the project come? We’re now reaching the point where a several percent of all the sites on the web are built with Open Source Content Management Systems. At the beginning of 2004, our industry barely existed:

Joomla.org has a new template today. The design looks a little similar to the website of another emerging new force in the United States.

It’s also interesting to note that the ! has been dropped from most uses on the homepage, something most books and blogs have done for a while.

Continue reading “Change Joomla Can Believe In”

There are some third rails in every community … things that people are reluctant to discuss. Joomla’s move to a GPL license was one of those, and I think we did a reasonable job of openly talking about the issues and implications.

This week, I’m going to attempt to touch another third rail: Joomla’s trademark.

Today, Joomla’s trademarks for its name and logo were accepted and published. This week, I’ll attempt to answer questions about what this means for Joomla and for people running Joomla sites. This first post lays out facts about the trademarks:

Continue reading “Joomla Trademarks Name and Logo”

I’ve been in the Mambo and Joomla world for several years now without going to a Joomla event. Now I’m headed to two within the next six weeks (Chicago and Vancouver) and every time I look at Joomla.org theres a new event announced.

I did some research and in April alone there were Joomla events in Norway, Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands, France and Spain.

Continue reading “Joomla Events No Longer a Rare Event”

For years, there has only been one option if you wanted to build a multilingual Joomla site.

Joom!fish is one of the most popular and widely-used extensions in the Joomlasphere and has a great team behind it, including Joomla core team members Alex Kempkens and Robin Muilwijk. Its recently been updated to work on Joomla 1.5.

Continue reading “A New Alternative to Joomfish on Joomla 1.5”