Steve’s Blog

December 28, 2009

Siteground Creates and Promotes Fake Awards

We’ve covered Siteground twice before on this blog. The first time I talked with grudging admiration about how they manage to dominate hosting search results by creating fake review sites and putting themselves at #1. Then we looked at how they’d taken over the old Mambo website for self-promotion. That grudging admiration has gone. The review sites I can understand. Hosting is a dog-eat-dog industry and many companies cross into ethically grey areas to promote themselves. Look no further than one of Siteground’s rival to host the Joomla demo site – Webhostingbuzz has organized a mass-spamming of joomla.org. However, their…

December 17, 2009

Joomla Holiday Coupons for 2009

Ho-ho-ho, and happy holidays to everyone. As we do every year, here’s a round-up of seasonal special offers from across the Joomla world: Alledia – 20% off with coupon “xmas“ until Christmas Day Open Source Training – 20% off with coupon “xmas“ until New Years Eve jReviews – 10% to 20% off most products until New Years Eve corePHP – 10% off with “holiday09” until New Years Day JsIFR3 – 20% off with coupon “59275” until New Years Eve JoomlaJunkie – 15% off with coupon “allediaxmas” until New Years Eve Joomlashack – 20% back in Amazon.com coupons if you spend…

December 15, 2009

Joomla and Drupal – Which One is Right for You? Version 2

Back in December 2006, we wrote the first comprehensive comparison of Drupal and Joomla. Over the next three years both projects have changed substantially, but the popularity of the original post hasn’t. Its been viewed nearly half-a-million times and still accounts for between 10 and 20% of our page visits every month. People really want an honest acknowledgement of the differences between the two. We originally compared Joomla 1.0 and Drupal 4. We’re now at Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 6. It’s long since past time to update the comparison. It’s also a good time because, after nearly three years buried…

December 14, 2009

Predictions for the Joomla World in 2010

1) Mobile-Ready Templates and Extensions Probably 50% of the articles and news I read now are on my phone. Morph from Prothemer.com is the first product I’ve seen to produce a really high-quality display of a Joomla site on the iPhone but expect more templates and extensions to follow their lead in 2010. 2) Venture Capital With the money to be made in Joomla and other CMSs, I’d be shocked if more companies didn’t start accepting and growing with Venture Capital funds. Artisteer is one example of what VC money can do:

November 27, 2009

What’s the Best New Music of 2009?

I rarely post off-topic but its a quiet day-after-Thanksgiving here and it seems like as a good a time as any. I’ve been working harder than ever during 2009 and as a music addict, I’ve been sustained by consuming several new albums each week (mainly thanks to the brilliance of EMusic). I know there’s more of you music addicts out there in the Joomla world from Fotis at Joomlaworks to Jennifer on the Joomla.org team, so here’s the question … what’s the best new music you’ve heard in 2009? If you can, please post a YouTube video in the comments…

November 25, 2009

Schedule for Joomla Developer Conference in New York

In a couple of weeks there’s going to be an important Joomla Developer Conference in New York. Starting with a social evening on the Friday 4th, the conference itself is a two-dayer over the weekend of the 5th and 6th. There’s also a hands-on development event on Monday. The location is beautiful: the Faculty House at Columbia University. Click here for full hotel and attendee information. Click here to register for the two day conference. Around 40 tickets are still available and they cost $100.

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.

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.

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.

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: