In this section you can read Alledia blog posts about Joomla tips and tricks.
During the last few weeks I’ve been working on taking our Joomla training classes online and we’ve been sending out a free weekly newsletter with Joomla tips and tricks. Last week, I decided to spend some time answering two really common questions:
People who teach Joomla know they feeling … things have been going well, but suddenly there’s a blank look. The student’s stuck on one point. You’ve tried a few ways to explain it, but they’re not getting the big picture. You rack your brain and start, “well, Joomla’s just like a … ” and you try to dig out a comparison.
Here are my top five favorite analogies to help people grasp Joomla’s key concepts. Please feel free to post your own in the comments.
I’ve been searching all over for an answer to a question I get asked frequently in Joomla classes:
“How can I resize images as I upload them?”
There are several good answers to this question including:
Back in Janaury I mentioned that I’d met a puzzle I couldn’t solve … Google was indexing a lot of search results on Joomla sites.
The problem appeared all on kinds of Joomla sites and with all kinds of URL extensions. I just couldn’t work out what where the bug was in Joomla.
It turns out the bug was in Google.
This is the answer to a question we’ve been asked repeatedly:
“I’m looking for a Joomla component that will allow me to change outbound links from direct urls into internal urls.“
Essentially they’re looking to change a link from http://www.bbc.co.uk to http://www.alledia.com/link/bbc/. The link still goes to the BBC, but it first goes to a url on the webmaster’s own site.
Continue reading “A Simple Way to Use Internal URLs for External Links”
The SEF Patch is one of the most vital SEO component from Joomla. However, it has one really, really useful function that surprises everyone when I mention it to them.
You can easily add and edit 100s of URLs at once and access a far greater range of features.
Here’s how ….
Continue reading “The One Trick Everyone Misses with the SEF Patch”
Its fairly common for a new Joomla site to have a few bugs when Search Engine Friendly URLs are turned on. Examples I’ve come across in the last few weeks have included a "Go to the Top" link breaking, and several links breaking in old versions of GroupJive.
One culprit was to blame: sefRelToAbs.
I’ve not been able to find the reason yet, but search engines been indexing a lot of search results on Joomla sites. It seems to be an issue with the component itself, rather than any particular URL setup. I’ve been able to identify the issue with several different setups:
There’s a lot to remember when launching a Joomla site, but theres one thing that you absolutely must do ….
Continue reading “One Thing You Must Do Before Launching a Joomla Site”
With free and commercial integrations of phpBB3 planned for Joomla 1.5, we’re soon going to have several excellent forum extensions available for Joomla.
However, for Joomla 1.0 Fireboard is still the best and easiest option. Here are three great ways to spice up your Fireboard installation:
This is a guest post from Tom Maiaroto of ExpandTheRoom. In this post he explains how to set the "Read More" on your Joomla frontpage to appear after a certain number of characters. This is useful to keep a standard appearance for your articles when you have a large number of people submitting content.
This post grew out of comment that Tom made on our original discussion about the "read more" on Joomla’s frontpage.
We welcome other guest posts. Simply login and click "Make a Guest Blog Post" in the right-hand menu.
I’ve talked before about how having less pages indexed is often better and after doing SEO audits on several sites last week I was reminded of how important this was. Sites with only 200 or 300 genuine pages of content had over 1000 pages indexed in Google.
Lots of Joomla components produce 100s and sometimes 1000s of unnecessary extra URLs that are then indexed by Google. A simple example is Mostree which is a very robust component but because it was built in pre-Ajax days, it creates separate 4 extra pages for each listing: recommend, rate, review and report listing.
In this post we’re using JReviews, Fireboard and MosTree as examples. You can cut-and-paste the rules from this post into your robots.txt file. However, please read the "important notes" section first.
Continue reading “How to Solve Common SEO Problems with JReviews, Fireboard and MosTree”