Steve’s Blog

June 18, 2008
11 Comments

Joomla Day Vancover Recap

Just got back from Joomla Day Vancouver at around 3 this morning, having enjoyed every minute of it.

With over 300 emails to answer and our monthly Atlanta Joomla meeting to organize for tonight, I hope you don’t mind if I leave most of the recap to other people.

Here’s an online roundup of the conference:

Presentations: Live blogging was done by Raul who has a substantial summary of almost every presentation.
Publicity: There’s a write-up on Linux.com which also talks about Joomla Days in general.
Photos: Rastin, one of the organizers, has a good number of pics from the event.

Continue reading “Joomla Day Vancover Recap”

June 12, 2008

Quick Round up Before JoomlaDay Vancouver

I’m off to Vancouver tonight and I’ll be taking my wife, so in addition to going to JoomlaDay Canada, I’ll have a couple of days vacation. The new Vancouver.com is incredible and its really whetted my appetite for a day or two off in such a beautiful city.

Posting will be light so I thought I’d post a short round-up of whats going on:

Continue reading “Quick Round up Before JoomlaDay Vancouver”

June 10, 2008

Does Siteground Control Mambos Website?

Mambo has been dying a slow death since the split from Joomla. In fact, the last time I visited their site was when they were forking again!

Its sad to see a once-great project in such a state. Several links on the homepage are broken, only three users were in the forum compared to over 800 in the Joomla forums and the “Download Mambo” didn’t work.

There are even paid links on their homepage. Scroll to the bottom of Mamboserver.com and you’ll see “CYLON: Internet Marketing, Check out our Customers:” and underneath a list of links including “Phone Card | Used Cars | Geh?use Netzteil USB | Phone Cards | Business Web Hosting”.

Even more shocking was that Siteground, whose antics we’ve covered here before, seem to have taken control of Mamboserver.com.

Continue reading “Does Siteground Control Mambos Website?”

June 5, 2008

More Joomla Training Dates in Atlanta

Around 5 weeks ago, we annouced Joomla training classes in Atlanta.

We’re happy to announce that the first class in June has sold out and that we’ve been able to schedule several more.

There are two dates for Beginner Joomla Training. No Joomla knowledge is required. The classes are aimed at people who want to manage and build successful
Joomla sites. We’ll be giving practical but not highly-technical
tuition:

Continue reading “More Joomla Training Dates in Atlanta”

June 4, 2008
16 Comments

Different Header Images on Different Pages

This is a straight-forward tutorial explaining how you can place different header or logo images on different pages of your site. For example, your sports site may need a baseball player on top of the baseball section, a golf player in the golf section and so on.

How Not to Do It

Create a different template for each page. Believe me, I’ve seen this done with over 30 header image, which means over 30 extra templates.

Continue reading “Different Header Images on Different Pages”

June 2, 2008
14 Comments

Open Question: Major Companies Using Joomla

Do you know of any major companies using Joomla?

I’ve decided to set the bar high by looking for sites that do over half-a-million uniques per month or belong to a truly substantial company. A good rule of thumb is “do they have a Wikipedia entry?”

Here’s what I’ve found so far:

Angelica (Publicly-traded health services company)
Avis (The car rental company in Nicaragua)
Burger King (For a special promotion)
CW.com (Main corporate site)
Danone (A lot more than just yogurts)
Derbi (Motorcycle maker – part of Piaggio)
English National Ballet (England’s flagship ballet company)
IBS Software (Software for airlines)
IT Wire (Most popular IT site in Australia)
Jetstar (Airline owned by Quantas)
Latvia (The country’s official site)
Mansfield Oil (Large U.S. Gasoline Distributor)
Mistubishi Venezuela and Poland (The car manufacturer)
Mountain West Sports (Cable TV sports channel owned by CBS)
Nikon Instruments (High-quality technical products)
Olympus (Camera maker’s Australian site)
Peg Perego (Italian child accessories)
Porsche (Brazilian site)
Quizilla (Heavilly modded Joomla site owned by MTV)
Scandinavian Airlines (Official crew guide)
Schneider Electric (World leader in power and control solutions)
Sprint (Customer feedback site for cell-phone company)
TNA Wrestling (Pro-wrestling organization)
Toshiba (Greek site for the electronics giant)
UNRIC (Branch of the United Nations)
Vodafone (Cell-phone company’s Icelandic site)
Visat (Danish site for Scandanavian TV and telecommunications company)
Yamaha (Musical instrument company’s Mexican site)

Feel free to post more sites in the comments and I’ll add to this list whenever we find a new one.

May 30, 2008

Need Security for your Joomla Site?

I’ve never made a recommendation for anyone else’s services on this blog, but I’m going to break that habit today.

A Joomla Security Expert

Its easy to find templates, extensions and web-designers but in some other areas high-quality people are in short supply. One of those is security. Few people have the server knowledge and Joomla know-how to effectively protect a Joomla site.

If you have been hacked or need a security audit to pre-empt problems in the future … we recommend Tom Canvan from JoomlaRescue.com. He doesn’t know I’m writing this blog post, but he deserves it. Here’s why …

We’ve sent him a good number of customers and they’ve all been delighted by his work.
Tom provides great service – he’s highly professional, friendly and responsive.
He’s written "Dodging the Bullets", the only book available about security for Joomla sites.
He’s been in the business for over 20 years.

Continue reading “Need Security for your Joomla Site?”

May 28, 2008

Google Bug Affecting Joomla Sites

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.

Continue reading “Google Bug Affecting Joomla Sites”

May 23, 2008

Open Question: Do You Have a Joomla Site with Great Rankings?

Earlier this week I posted my talk about Joomla SEO from the JoomlaExpo in Chicago. The penultimate slide was a list of sites that ranked #1 on Google and some people responding with details of their own success with Joomla.

I’m going to be giving variations of this presentation a few more times in months to come and so I thought I’d give you an opportunity to boast:

Do you have a Joomla site with great rankings?

Feel free to post as many or as few details about the site as you wish. I’ll include the best ones in the presentation.

May 20, 2008

Joomla SEO Presentation from JoomlaExpo

This is my presentation on Joomla SEO from JoomlaExpo.

Increasingly we’re going to be recommending two SEO solutions for both Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5 … sh404SEF and the SEF Patch. I’m in the process of rewriting the SEO Book to make those our clear recommendations for most 1.0 and 1.5 sites, but this is the first time I’ve explained that publicly.

Continue reading “Joomla SEO Presentation from JoomlaExpo”

May 19, 2008

JoomlaExpo Was a Huge Success

I arrived back from Chicago just before midnight yesterday and I’m still buzzing today.

The JoomlaExpo was a huge success. I’ve a whole bunch of stuff to organize and post over the coming week from Powerpoints, handouts, Expo recaps and news of the big Joomla project that was announced with the City of Chicago.

There were over 280 people at the Expo including some from Malaysia, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, England, Scotland and many other places. The whole event was pulled together by excellent organization from the JoomlaChicago members.

Click here and also here to see photos of the event. More to come later in the week when I’ve had more sleep. If you haven’t done so already, I’d definitely recommend attending a Joomla event near you. Next up is Vancouver.

May 19, 2008
13 Comments

How the Washington Post is Ruining its Brand Online

Note: Please be aware that this post contains some disturbing quotes to make its point.

What on earth is wrong with the Washington Post.

The Washington Post is one of the oldest newspapers in the U.S. and one of the most important because it’s read by D.C.’s powerbrokers. It’s famous for numerous stories from the Spanish-American war to Watergate.

The Post is allowing decades of its reputation to be destroyed online. Their site has already been in trouble for posting spurious chain-emails as facts, but it seems as if they’re sinking even lower at the moment.

Continue reading “How the Washington Post is Ruining its Brand Online”