Steve’s Blog

February 5, 2010

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…

February 3, 2010

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.…

February 2, 2010

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…

February 2, 2010

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…

February 2, 2010

101 Ways to speed up your Joomla site

Well currently 12 16 ways but with your help we will make it 101! I’ll update the post as and when we get more ways to speed up your joomla site. What with Matt Cutts recent (ish) interview with Web Pro News, he mentions that google will be taking page load times into consideration when they rank your website. What does this mean for all the joomla users? Can joomla keep up?

January 29, 2010

Showing Different Drupal Themes on Different Pages

This tutorial was written written after a request in one of this week’s Drupal classes: “How do I show different Drupal themes on different pages?”. The answer is a module called “Sections”: Installing Sections to Your Drupal Site Step 1: Click here to download the latest version of “Sections”. Step 2: Extract the files into a folder on your desktop. The folder will be called “sections”. Step 3: Login to your site’s files via FTP and navigate to If there isn’t a folder called /modules/ here, create one. Step 4: Upload the “sections” folder to /sites/all/modules/ Step 5: Go…

January 28, 2010

Approving Joomla Users When They Register

This tutorial is similar to last week’s in two ways: becaue it’s the answer to a question asked by a user in our support forum and also because it deals with managing people signing up on your Joomla site. It has one important difference however … it’s much shorter! This week’s tutorial explains how to approve Joomla users when they register. You might have a school website and only want to approve parents or students. You might have a club website and only want to have members join your site. This tutorial will show you how. We’re

January 27, 2010

Add a Sitemap to Your WordPress Site

Why Add a Sitemap? I’ll be honest and say that I don’t believe sitemaps improve your ranking in search engines. However, they do make sure more pages get indexed and that they get indexed more quickly. This article presents evidence that the difference is astounding: Google with a sitemap: 14 minutes Google without a sitemap: 1375 minutes Yahoo with a sitemap: 245 minutes Yahoo without a sitemap: 1773 minutes

January 22, 2010

Changing the Logo on a WordPress Theme

Perhaps the #1 most common question WordPress we get from beginners is: “How do I change the logo on a theme?” This tutorial is the answer: Step 1: Go and download the Firefox browser, if you haven’t done so yet: Firefox is much better than Internet Explorer or Safari for working on websites. Step 2: Start Firefox so that you’re browing the web with it. We’re now going to install an extra toolbar for Firefox. It is called the “Web Developer” toolbar. Visit this page:

January 22, 2010

Google Sidewiki … Friend or Foe?

I’m actually quite fascinated with this little tool from Google… apparently its quite controversial and I can see why. So far I’ve not really done a lot with it, other that leave complaints on websites to warn other people about dodgy dealings… one of the main comments that sticks in my mind is a site where I bought my girlfriend some flowers and she did not get anywhere near the amount of flowers that were in the picture, I complained directly and got little worthy response, so decided to take action. I think people are usually more driven to complain…