Product Reviews

In this section you can read Alledia blog posts containing product reviews.

Your Thoughts on Joomla Security Extensions?

One of my Joomla clients has been hacked by a phishing scheme and it has been a major pain to cleanup. Besides being behind a couple versions in their Joomla, there are multiple third party components installed.

I have been looking at a couple of Joomla security products to help in the process and to use to prevent this in the future. I was wondering if any of Steve’s readers had experience with them, could tell us all about their experience with them, and possibly mention any others they would recommend? I have been looking at RS Firewall and SecureLive.

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joomla seo sef box

Review of RSSEO Suite by RSJoomla.com

joomla seo sef boxI must admit I knew nothing about RSSeo before starting this review despite having used other RSJoomla products before.

After few minutes of using it, I realised it was very familiar: RSSeo is similar in many ways to iJoomla SEO which we reviewed last last year. Both are essentially quick and easy ways to manage your site’s metadata, plus some additional SEO tools.

Whereas there were very few metadata options available last year, RSSeo joins iJoomla SEO as a worthy option.

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Wordpress for Joomla

Review of WordPress for Joomla by corePHP.com

Wordpress for JoomlaWe’ve always used Joomla as our blog platform of choice here at Alledia. People are  always surprised by that, which is pleasing … it took a lot of work. We needed a whole variety of different extensions to create the normal features of a blog.

Because it requires quite a bit of effort, Joomla developers have long looked enviously at WordPress and the default blogging features it has. Several have tried to bridge WordPress into Joomla including MojoBlog. The latest and perhaps the most comprehensive is WordPress for Joomla by corePHP.com.

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AceSEF logo

Review of AceSEF from Joomace.net

AceSEF logoA few weeks ago we covered the five most powerful extensions you can use to optimize your Joomla site. We had 80 comments on the article, but half-way through the discussion was hijacked by the developer of a new product: AceSEF. They managed to rub people the wrong way quickly. They have also had problems with voting irregularities on the Joomla.org Extensions site. All in all, I was prepared to dislike AceSEF.

I was very pleasantly surprised. AceSEF is as good as, and probably better than, the other Joomla SEO extensions.

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Joomla Goes CCKrazy

CCK for JoomlaApologies for the lack of blogging over the last few weeks, I’ve been wrapped up in something else since the beginning of September.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve always tried to be honest with people and acknowledge that Joomla had two achilles heels:

  1. It didn’t allow a lot of control over what people can and cannot access (ACL or Access Control Level)
  2. It didn’t allow you to customize your content articles with extra fields or extra layers of categories (CCK or Content Construction Kit)

Joomla’s Ecosystem is Strong

If you want proof that the Joomla ecosystem is strong, you can find it here. Lots of commercial providers stepped in to create ACL solutions and then this week we had the announcement that ACL has entered the Joomla core.

And then there’s CCK:

Before 2009, there was really only Sobi2 and Mosets Tree, both of which were really business directories that could be repurposed. Now it seems that you can’t turn around without tripping over a new CCK release.

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iJoomla SEO

Review of iJoomla SEO from iJoomla.com

iJoomla SEOBack in March I was able to test iJoomla.com’s new SEO component called, somewhat appropriately: iJoomla SEO. It didn’t impress me much. You weren’t able to add metadata to menu links or third-party extensions which meant that the homepage and many key sites pages were missed.

6 months later and a new version arrived, so I gave it a spin. My opinion this time was much different:

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Jomsocial

Review of Jomsocial

This is a sponsored review of the Jomsocial extension. For details of having your extension reviewed, please contact us. Note that a sponsored review doesn’t mean I’ll like the product, just that I’ll take the time to review it thoroughly.


Jomsocial For several years there has really one been one social networking option for Joomla … Community Builder. Some people love it, others hate it, but it was impossible to ignore. We use it here on alledia.com because three years ago it was really the only option for expanded user profiles and networking.

Two months ago Azrul, the developer of Jomcomment and MyBlog, released an alternative social networking solution called Jomsocial. Is it any good?

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Installation Manager Joomla

Joomla Installer Improvements

Installation Manager JoomlaHere’s a quick rundown of some ways in which Joomla and third-party developers are trying to make managing your Joomla site much easier:

Automatic Updates for the Joomla 1.5 Core

Joomla Magic Updater
installs as a component and then allows you to update to the latest
Joomla version with a simple button click. The files are taken directly
from joomla.org. People seem to love it. In less than a month on the
Joomla Extensions Directory its one of the top rated extensions with
over 25 rave reviews.

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Fireboard Forums

Discussion of SEO for Fireboard Forums

Fireboard ForumsI 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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updater.png

Automatic Updates for Joomla

If you subscribe to the Joomla Extensions Directory RSS feed, you can see the future of Joomla pass before your eyes. Sure, there are a lot of "me-too" listings but at least once a week there’s something new and exciting.

The latest extension to catch my eye is an automatic installer and updater. Its key selling point? It allows you to install just one extension and use that install and updates dozens of others. No more registering, downloading, uploading and looking out for updates.

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