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.
I’ve made this chart after getting several requests in the last few days, all asking which Joomla E-Commerce they should use. There’s no right answer as the two main shopping carts, Virtuemart and iJoomla Digistore, are both very different.
There are two other shopping carts available that look like they may become contenders:
If any major features have been missed and need comparing, drop a note in the comments.
There 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:
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:
You may have noticed that I’ve been blogging less lately. There’s probably a dozen reasons for that (family visiting from England, new projects, running the SEO Club, the hot summer making my brain tired) but theres been one stand-out … I just haven’t come across many things I really, really had to post.
If you read this blog often, you’ll know I love building sites with sh404SEF. However, its such a powerful extension that it can be complex. There are several issues that people keep asking me about. So instead of giving the same answer every time, I’ve written up the answers in a single document.
This is a free article from the SEO Club’s guide to sh404SEF. Club members can look forward to the release of a full guide to Artio JoomSEF within the next couple of days. If you’re not a member, we’re still offering a free two week trial.
Are you looking to learn Joomla 1.5? There are Joomla training sessions coming up in Atlanta, Boston (MT), Manchester (NH), Hartford (CT) and Albany (NY).
We have a special offer for Alledia blog readers today … $50 discounts for all of those Joomla training sessions:
To find out more about the Atlanta training, please click here. To find out more about New England, keep reading:
Continue reading “Joomla Training Discounts in Atlanta and New England”
Google launched their Knol site last week. Despite the slightly silly name and Google’s failure to get Knol.com from a Joomla site, I though it would worthwhile to take some time and write a couple:
Back at JoomlaExpo in Chicago, one guy stood up during Barrie North’s presentation and very happily announced he’d found Barrie’s tutorials so useful that he’d sent him a box of juicy steaks.
I didn’t get any food this week, but did get a big box of T-shirts
courtesy of CustomLogoUSA.com who have been SEO Club members for
several months. They’re a very friendly company from Syracuse,
New York who allow you to put your logo on all sorts of items.
So this week’s open question is …
No 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.
If you’re serious about getting repeat visitors and building your brand, sending out newsletters is a vital tactic. Sometimes its hard to get started with a subscriber base, but there are tactics that work well – surveys are my favorite.
Prospect Magazine carred out a survey to rate the "world’s top 100 public intellectuals". A pretty boring subject, but it caught on with newspapers running campaigns to vote for local heroes in Indonesia, Canada, India, Spain, Bulgaria and Turkey. This story about the results on NPR really got my attention with a quote at the end:
Interviewer: "Do you have many subscribers in Turkey at this point?"
Propsect Staff Member: "We’re hoping to get a lot more. We quite cleverly made it compulsory for people who are voting to enter an email address into the system. Our email newsletter list is now made up of about 95% Turks."
Some very good news from the Joomla 1.5 world today … Google Website Optimizer now works with Joomla 1.5.
If you haven’t tried it yet, Website Optimizer is a tool for testing different versions of your site to see which one produces a higher conversion rate.
Thanks to Anthony from Joomla Performance and Barrie from Compass Designs for their work on this.