Steve’s Blog

Thoughts on Being Elected to Open Source Matters

Last week I was fortunate enough to be elected to the Open Source Matters board along with 5 others. After having a very U.S.-centric board, it’s great to see such a wide diversity of new members. Add a Aussie and a penguin and we’d have someone from all seven continents 🙂 Marko Milenovic – Serbia Javier Gomez – Spain Jacques Rentzke – South Africa Robert Deutz – Germany Akarawuth Tamrareang – Thailand

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Importing RSS Feeds Into WordPress Posts

This tutorial will show you how to take an RSS feed and import it into your WordPress site. Each item on the RSS feed will become a separate WordPress post. We use this technique for a couple purposes: Distributing our content to other WordPress sites. Importing blogs and news on a particular topic from other sites. This way people can read them all in one place. We’re going to use a plugin called FeedWordPress.

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Review of RSSEO Suite by RSJoomla.com

I 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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Printer-friendly Versions of Drupal Articles

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to add a “Print This Page” button to Drupal. The main reason you’d want to do this is as a courtesy for your readers. Many still print things they read online and you don’t want them to waste that expensive printer ink just to print your logo and theme as well as the article. This is a themed tutorial because our sister newsletter with WordPress tutorials is covering the same topic this week: Creating Printer-friendly Versions of WordPress Posts. Without this solution you’d likely need to create a separate CSS file with styles…

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Creating Printer-friendly Versions of WordPress Posts

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to place add “Print This Post” button to WordPress. The main reason you’d want do this is as a courtesy for your readers. Many still print things they read online and you don’t want them to waste that expensive printer ink just to print your logo and theme as well as the post. This is a themed tutorial because our sister newsletter with Drupal tutorials is covering the same topic this week: Creating Printer-friendly Versions of Drupal Articles. Without this solution you’d likely need to create a separate CSS file with styles specifically…

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5 Useful JCE Features That People Miss

It’s no secret that Joomla’s default editor lacks quite a few features. We often recommend that people upgrade to Joomla Content Editor (JCE). You can click here to find full instructions on how to install JCE, including a video. What we’re going to cover in this tutorial are 5 really great features of JCE that people often don’t realise are there: 1) Cut and Paste Images Into Different Folders One common complaint about Joomla’s default Media Manager is that you can’t move images around. Once you’ve uploaded an image to one location, you’ll need to delete it and re-upload it…

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Joomla is a Hotbed of Innovation. Be Proud.

Since we expanded into Drupal and WordPress training quite a few people have asked variations on these questions: “Are you abandoning Joomla?” “Do you think Drupal and WordPress are now better than Joomla?” The simple answers are no and no. Last summer we discussed how smart companies were now supporting several CMS platforms and gave some reasons why. I like to think we’re just following our own advice. I’ve another reason to add … Joomla companies are remarkably dynamic and entrepreneurial. Looking back over the last few years, Joomla has been a remarkable hotbed of innovation, particularly when it comes…

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3 Reasons to Hire a Content Writer

Building an online reputation begins with your website. It is the first place people go to “check you out,” even if you have been highly recommended by clients or peers.  So, crafting an effective and powerful message in conjunction with an aesthetically pleasing site, a well-organized site and one with a clear call to action sometimes means hiring a good writer. There are a bunch of reasons to hire a good content writer, but I will only mention the three I think are most pertinent to web site progress. You hate to write!  That’s a no brainer in my opinion.…

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Our Joomla Training Classes Are Now Available Online

Remember that big countdown clock on the side of our site … this is what it was leading up to: We’ve become the #1 Joomla training company by running 100’s of training classes in over 30 cities from Alaska to London, including 18 classes in the last week of January alone. However, we still get plenty of emails like this: “Will you be holding any classes in North Dakota?” “Any chance of a Joomla session in Australia?” “Do you offer Joomla training in the Middle East?” We could never go to all those places in person, so we’ve made the…

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Joomla Websites Always Showing Today’s Date

Here’s a little fix we came across today while trying to find out why blog posts on this site had started always showing today’s date. Even if a post was written in 2006 or 2007 it would show a 2010 date. Thanks to Anthony from Joomla Bamboo for helping me find the fix. The problem is with overrides and you’re likely to find them in this folder: / templates / your-template-name / html / com_content / article / default.php The correct date line is going to look similar to this: <?php echo JHTML::_(‘date’, $this->article->created, JText::_(‘<div class=”month”>%b</div><div class=”day”>%d</div>%Y’)); ?> I’ve highlighted…

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