Steve’s Blog

January 17, 2010

Setting up a Joomla Business Directory or Yellow Pages

This tutorial which will show you how to create a business directory or Yellow Pages on your Joomla site. We’re going to use a component called Sobi2, which is available from www.sigsiu.net.

Installing Sobi2

Click here to download the Sobi2 component.
Go to Administrator >> Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload the Sobi2 files.
Click “Install Sobi2 data”
Go to Menus >> Main Menu and click “New”
Choose Sobi2 >> Frontpage or Selected Category for your menu link. Give the link a title such as “Directory” and click save.
Visit the front of your site and click on the new “Directory” link. It should look like the screenshot on the right:

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January 17, 2010

Adding a Shopping Cart to Joomla

Simple Joomla Shopping Cart One of the most common questions we get from Joomla learners is … How do I set up a shopping cart with Joomla?

For several years the only option was Virtuemart. However, Virtuemart is a very large and complex product that it simply overkill for many sites.

Fortunately, some simpler and easier shopping carts have recently been released and perhaps the best of the bunch is RokQuickCart from Rockettheme.com.

It does have basic tax and shipping options, plus support for either PayPal or Google Checkout. It doesn’t have the ability to put products into categories or have custom fields for products (except color and size). Really it’s ideal for a website selling up to 20 or 30 products.

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January 14, 2010
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Integrating Magento and Joomla Using MageBridge

We had a great presentation at the Atlanta Joomla Users Group last night. Paul from http://netproffitt.com went over the integration possibilities with Joomla and Magento, a very powerful open source shopping cart.

Suffice it to say that Magento is miles ahead of Virtuemart in at least three areas:

Features
Complexity
Expense

If you’re looking for a very simple shopping cart with Joomla, Magento isn’t it but RokQuickCart is a good option. Paul’s presentation is embedded below.

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January 13, 2010
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The Biggest Ever Week of Joomla and Drupal Training

Did you guys make a resolution in 2010? Lose a little weight … stop wasting so much time Twitter … (OK, those are mine)

As a business, we made just one: spread the Joomla and Drupal gospel as widely as possible.

At Christmas last year, we hit 100 Joomla classes. Those were held from Alaska to London and from Vancouver to Miami. This year we’re starting so quickly that we could run 100 classes in a month at this rate.

During the last 10 days of January, we’re running 18 classes all across North America. They stretch 3500 kilometers from Toronto in the north to Los Angeles in the south. Here’s how they look on a map:

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January 11, 2010

What Joomla People Need to Know About WordPress 3.0

I had the chance to attend Wordcamp Atlanta on Saturday. It was a well-run event in a great location: the Savannah College of Art and Design.

The best presentation was the keynote delivered by Jane Wells who is the User Experience lead from Automattic.

Here’s her rundown of where WordPress is going in 2010, head-lined by the release of WordPress 3.0. A lot of WordPress’ successes and problems have lessons for us in the Joomla world.

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January 5, 2010

Optimising Joomla and Virtuemart for Google Base

This is a guest blog post by David Dawson from Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd

I have been working with google base on my website now for sometime. I’ve found a few different things that can greatly change the way that your products are viewed within Google Base. This is where you can upload products that are then show in Google’s search results. Because Google shows them so frequently, this can be beneficial even if you only have a few products that you want to upload.

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January 4, 2010

Against-the-Grain Thinking for 2010

Last month I made some predictions for the Joomla world in 2010. Here a couple more ideas that I’ve been thinking about but haven’t yet had the courage to act on:

1) What if CMSs as We Know Them Have Peaked?

What if the CMS industry has reached its high-point and may start to receed?

Louis Landry mentioned, “I am personally looking beyond CMS because I think the traditional CMS is probably not going to be the focus of the web in the near future.”

Certainly the big 3 all seem to have plateaued during 2009:

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December 28, 2009

Siteground Creates and Promotes Fake Awards

We’ve covered Siteground twice before on this blog. The first time I talked with grudging admiration about how they manage to dominate hosting search results by creating fake review sites and putting themselves at #1. Then we looked at how they’d taken over the old Mambo website for self-promotion.

That grudging admiration has gone. The review sites I can understand. Hosting is a dog-eat-dog industry and many companies cross into ethically grey areas to promote themselves. Look no further than one of Siteground’s rival to host the Joomla demo site – Webhostingbuzz has organized a mass-spamming of joomla.org. However, their latest technique crosses the line into fraud:

They are creating and promoting fake awards.

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December 17, 2009

Joomla Holiday Coupons for 2009

Ho-ho-ho, and happy holidays to everyone. As we do every year, here’s a round-up of seasonal special offers from across the Joomla world:

Alledia – 20% off with coupon “xmas“ until Christmas Day
Open Source Training – 20% off with coupon “xmas“ until New Years Eve
jReviews – 10% to 20% off most products until New Years Eve
corePHP – 10% off with “holiday09” until New Years Day
JsIFR3 – 20% off with coupon “59275” until New Years Eve
JoomlaJunkie – 15% off with coupon “allediaxmas” until New Years Eve
Joomlashack – 20% back in Amazon.com coupons if you spend over $100
Open Source Support Desk – 15% off with coupon “holiday09” until New Years Eve

Have you found other coupons or do you have one for your own product? Feel free to post them in the comments:

December 15, 2009
12 Comments

Joomla and Drupal – Which One is Right for You? Version 2

Back in December 2006, we wrote the first comprehensive comparison of Drupal and Joomla. Over the next three years both projects have changed substantially, but the popularity of the original post hasn’t. Its been viewed nearly half-a-million times and still accounts for between 10 and 20% of our page visits every month. People really want an honest acknowledgement of the differences between the two.

We originally compared Joomla 1.0 and Drupal 4. We’re now at Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 6. It’s long since past time to update the comparison. It’s also a good time because, after nearly three years buried in Joomla, I’ve spent the last three months returning to and re-examining Drupal and in preparation for teaching it.

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December 14, 2009
9 Comments

Predictions for the Joomla World in 2010

1) Mobile-Ready Templates and Extensions

Probably 50% of the articles and news I read now are on my phone. Morph from Prothemer.com is the first product I’ve seen to produce a really high-quality display of a Joomla site on the iPhone but expect more templates and extensions to follow their lead in 2010.

2) Venture Capital

With the money to be made in Joomla and other CMSs, I’d be shocked if more companies didn’t start accepting and growing with Venture Capital funds. Artisteer is one example of what VC money can do:

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November 27, 2009
49 Comments

What’s the Best New Music of 2009?

I rarely post off-topic but its a quiet day-after-Thanksgiving here and it seems like as a good a time as any.

I’ve been working harder than ever during 2009 and as a music addict, I’ve been sustained by consuming several new albums each week (mainly thanks to the brilliance of EMusic).

I know there’s more of you music addicts out there in the Joomla world from Fotis at Joomlaworks to Jennifer on the Joomla.org team, so here’s the question … what’s the best new music you’ve heard in 2009? If you can, please post a YouTube video in the comments so we can listen along.

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