Steve’s Blog

October 15, 2008
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Joomla Code Commits vs Drupal and WordPress

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.

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October 14, 2008

Official Support Will End for Joomla 1.0

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.

October 9, 2008

Hitting the Open Source Wall

Hitting the wall:

“In endurance sports, particularly cycling and running, hitting the wall describes the condition when an athlete suddenly loses energy“. (via Wikipedia)

Hitting the open source wall:

“In building a project, particularly when giving it away free, hitting the wall describes the condition when an project suddenly loses energy“. (via me)

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October 6, 2008

Discussion of SEO for Fireboard Forums

I hope this will be the first of a series of open discussions focusing on popular Joomla extensions.

A very smart SEO Club member ( Suchmaschinenoptimierung Joomla ) helped me brainstorm a list of things to be aware of when optimizing a site with Fireboard. I’m going to give those here and then turn if over to you guys for any other tips, tricks or problems that you have.

1) Using ‘RE:’ for All Replies

This is an example of one page with two URLs, a clear duplicate content problem:

forums/general/form-search-not-working
forums/general/re-form-search-not-working

Solution: go to administrator / components / com_fireboard / and on
line 1306 change DEFINE(‘_POST_RE’, ‘Re:’); to DEFINE(‘_POST_RE’, ”);

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October 1, 2008

Training for Joomla in Tampa, Florida

If you read the Alledia blog regularly you know we’re doing training for Joomla beginners across the eastern, southern and mid-USA. You can find a full list of classes on JoomlaTraining.com.

Each week, with about 2 months before the class, we’re giving a rundown of the training in each city. We’ve covered the November 7th class in Washington D.C. and the class a week later in New York City. The third and final one I’ll cover is a session in Tampa on Saturday November 22nd.

A quick note: we took a shot at teaching in 5 cities. Washington, New York, Tampa and Atlanta all have enough students signed up for us to hold the classes (even several weeks out) but St. Louis is the odd one out. Not a squeek out of the people in the Mid-West. So if you’d like training in that region, try the CMS Expo in Denver in December. I’ll be there too!

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September 30, 2008

Why Caching Your Joomla Site is So Useful

For about a week this month there were problems with the cache component we use here on Alledia.com. I turned it off while we tried to bugshoot the issue.

We also use Pingdom.com to track whether our sites are offline and also how fast they’re responding. When I logged in today, I found a stellar argument for why caching your Joomla site is so important:

Alledia.com loads twice as quickly with the cache turned on.

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September 29, 2008

Managed Hosting for Joomla Sites

Last week, I discussed Acquia which provides managed commercial grade support for Drupal sites. This week, I’m going to talk about some companies that don’t quite have $7 million in their back pocket, but are creating new support and hosting products for Joomla.

I’m always fascinated by new business models in the Joomla world, so I’ll let the leaders of these two projects explain what they’re up to:

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September 24, 2008

Training for Joomla in New York City

If you read the Alledia blog regularly you know we’re doing training for Joomla beginners across the eastern, southern and mid-USA. You can find a full list of classes on JoomlaTraining.com.

Each week, with about 2 months before the class, we’re giving a rundown of the training in each city.

Last week we covered the November 7th class in Washington D.C.. The second class is a week later in New York City – downtown Manhattan to be precise.

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September 24, 2008

Open Question: Using Encoded Joomla Components

Back at the beginning of 2007 I wrote about why I’d love Joomla developers to stop encoding components and gave a rundown of why encoding bugs me.

However, sometimes the only solution, short of writing your own, is to use an encoded extension. We’ve faced that problem this week, moving a large and popular site to Joomla. To evaluate whether or not to use encoded work, we came up with a list of criteria that might be useful to some of you:

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September 22, 2008
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Drupal’s Founder Tries to Emulate Red Hat

Can I pat myself on the back? 18 months ago, I asked if Drupal or Joomla could produce a company like Red Hat.

It turns out that Drupal’s founder Dries Buytaert wants to do just that. At the beginning of this year, his company Acquia received $7 million in venture capital funding.

Where has that money gone? Over at Information Week, Acquia marketing VP explains:

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September 17, 2008

Joomla Training Class in Washington

A couple of weeks back, I announced that we’d be doing Joomla training classes across the United States from Tampa in the south, New York up north and St. Louis and Denver in the midwest. You can find the full list on our Joomla Training website, including Barrie North’s training class which is this Friday in Boston.

Each week until the classes I’m going to give you a brief introduction to each class, including the who, what, where, when and answers to other important questions.

Our first class, 7 weeks away now, is in the nation’s capital. Here’s what you need to know about the Joomla training class in Washington D.C.:

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September 17, 2008

How can the Joomla 15 Admin Process Be Improved?

In one of a series of guest posts here on the Alledia blog, Brian Teeman who follows on from Kyle Ledbetter of Joomlapraise.com who asked whether Joomla admin templates are worth the effort.

Joomla is great and does everything I want (well it doesn’t make my coffee but we can’t have everything). But there are times when I just tear my hair out at the poor usability of the backend.

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