Recommended Sites – Steve Burge

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?”

April 18, 2008

Five Really Useful Joomla Blog Posts

I write summary posts very rarely, but in the last few weeks I’ve read several great Joomla-related articles.

Its time to point you towards five really useful Joomla blog posts, one each on the topics of usability, performance, analytics, e-commerce and MySQL.
Continue reading “Five Really Useful Joomla Blog Posts”

March 12, 2007

Free Joomla Templates and Great CSS Advice

Its great to see people in the Joomla community taking the time and effort to build free sites that are genuninely useful resources. Today, I’ll highlight two of the very best:

Joomla24.com

Back in the Mambo days, when I was first investigating Mambo there was one place go to in order to find quality, free templates – Mambohut.com. I spent many hours learning how to design for Mambo by downloading and tearing apart designs from that site. Since the move to Joomla, that site hasn’t been update very regularly and so its great so see a new site provide such a comprehensive resource.

One thing that often bugs me about free download sites is the sheer number of Adsense and affilitate banners, blocking easy navigation of the site and often crowded around the "download" button, in order to try and gain a few extra bucks a day. Joomla24.com manages to advertise while making sure that the site is still easy on the eye and intuitive to navigate. They also claim to have 1300 templates available.

JoomlaCSSGuide.com

Until now, when people asked me how to learn and research the default CSS for Joomla, I’d pointed them over to Joomlart’s tutorial. In the future, I’ll be recommending JoomlaCSSGuide.com which takes the Joomlart concept one step further and breaks down not just the CSS for content items but also all the core components, modules and mambots. Its an excellent site that must have taken quite a bit of work to get ready for launch.

One minor quibble – it would be nice if people launching new sites took the time to build a small "About Us" page. Nothing builds trust quite as quickly as being upfront about how you are.