Steve’s Blog

November 19, 2009

Review of WordPress for Joomla by corePHP.com

We’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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November 18, 2009

We’re Expanding to Drupal, WordPress and OSTraining.com

By the end of 2009, JoomlaTraining.com will have run over 100 Joomla training classes in locations from Alaska to Miami and from Los Angeles to London. It’s time to grow!

We’ll be working in the same cities with the same high-standards, and even some of the same experienced teachers, but we’ll now be adding both Drupal and WordPress classes.

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November 16, 2009

Review of AceSEF from Joomace.net

A 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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November 13, 2009

Virtuemart 1.5 Underway – New Team Members Needed

VirtueMart, the leading shopping cart extension for Joomla, is now looking for new talent to work on the next version of VirtueMart v1.5 and subsequent versions. We have the best integration between our leading shopping cart extension and the best content management system for websites. Now we are searching for excellent talent in many areas of our team. If you have experience in any of the following skills, we would like to hear from you:

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November 11, 2009

Joomla Community Fundraising for Doctors Without Borders

Brian Teeman has been working hard to put together a great idea for the Joomla community: collectively raising money for Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian aid organisation that provides emergency medical assistance to populations in danger in more than 80 countries. It seemed like such a good idea that we decided to help.

How We Can Help

November 18th will be the last meeting of the year for the Atlanta Joomla User Group, so we’re going try to invoke the holiday spirit a little early. This is the plan for next week’s meet-up:

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November 2, 2009

Joomla 1.6 Usability Improvements

I had time to take a good look at the Alpha version of Joomla 1.6 this weekend. The Art of Joomla is doing a great job of explaining new features. I’ll also blog later about the new SEO features … they’ve taken on board of a lot our recommendations including the ability to control the metadata for each page!

However, today thought I’d hightlight some nice usability improvements. Several common frustrations that beginners had with 1.5 seem to have been resolved:

1) The “Menu Manager” Has a Purpose

In 1.5 beginners always expect the Menu Manager to do much more … such as actually manage something. In 1.6 the Menu Manager is much more closely integrated with the display of menu links. Oh, and you no longer get those four confusing boxes when making a new menu:

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October 30, 2009

Non-Profit Winners Announced For 100th Class

We’re delighted to be able to announce the winners of a free ticket to our 100th Joomla training class.

Last month we announced that the class in Atlanta would be free completely free to non-profit or charity organizations.

We received many more applications than we had places, so this week we’ve been digging through the entries to find the winners. It was fascinating to see such a huge-cross section of society using Joomla – we had applications from groups focused housing, music, animals, education, theater, religion, cycling, tourism, families and much more.

We plan on making this an annual event so keep an eye out next year.

With no futher ado, here are the organizations who’ll be able to learn more about Joomla for free in 2009:

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October 28, 2009

Thoughts on Drupal and the White House Website

Saturday was the biggest event for Open Source CMS systems since 2005.

Back in February 2005 we had the launch of WordPress.com with super-easy installs and also WordPress 1.5 with changeable themes. Later in the year, Joomla split from Mambo.

On Saturday, Drupal started powering Whitehouse.gov. It’s such a big catch that it brings hugely increased credibility, not just for Drupal, but for our Open Source CMS industry in general. If you’re not bidding for your next project by saying “this kind of software powers the White House website”, you’re crazy.

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October 26, 2009

Local Joomla Installations Are Not Worth The Effort

Am I alone in thinking that we’re doing Joomla beginners a big disservice by recommending that they start with a local installation?

Almost every Joomla tutorial starts with a description of how to install Joomla on your computer and it nearly always causes complete befuddlement amongst learners.

Last year I had the interesting experience of agreeing to be the technical editor for a Joomla beginner book. After a brief introduction, the next 50 pages were taken up by a detailed explanation of how to install XAMPP, troubleshoot Apache and configure ports. After thoroughly intimidating the poor beginner using a PC, users on Linux were given two paragraphs, and Mac users got the same treatment.

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October 5, 2009

Joomla Goes CCKrazy

CCK for Joomla Apologies 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:

It didn’t allow a lot of control over what people can and cannot access (ACL or Access Control Level)
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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