Steve’s Blog

September 24, 2008

Open Question: Using Encoded Joomla Components

Back at the beginning of 2007 I wrote about why I’d love Joomla developers to stop encoding components and gave a rundown of why encoding bugs me.

However, sometimes the only solution, short of writing your own, is to use an encoded extension. We’ve faced that problem this week, moving a large and popular site to Joomla. To evaluate whether or not to use encoded work, we came up with a list of criteria that might be useful to some of you:

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September 22, 2008

Drupal’s Founder Tries to Emulate Red Hat

Can I pat myself on the back? 18 months ago, I asked if Drupal or Joomla could produce a company like Red Hat.

It turns out that Drupal’s founder Dries Buytaert wants to do just that. At the beginning of this year, his company Acquia received $7 million in venture capital funding.

Where has that money gone? Over at Information Week, Acquia marketing VP explains:

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September 17, 2008

Joomla Training Class in Washington

A couple of weeks back, I announced that we’d be doing Joomla training classes across the United States from Tampa in the south, New York up north and St. Louis and Denver in the midwest. You can find the full list on our Joomla Training website, including Barrie North’s training class which is this Friday in Boston.

Each week until the classes I’m going to give you a brief introduction to each class, including the who, what, where, when and answers to other important questions.

Our first class, 7 weeks away now, is in the nation’s capital. Here’s what you need to know about the Joomla training class in Washington D.C.:

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September 17, 2008

How can the Joomla 15 Admin Process Be Improved?

In one of a series of guest posts here on the Alledia blog, Brian Teeman who follows on from Kyle Ledbetter of Joomlapraise.com who asked whether Joomla admin templates are worth the effort.

Joomla is great and does everything I want (well it doesn’t make my coffee but we can’t have everything). But there are times when I just tear my hair out at the poor usability of the backend.

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September 16, 2008

Search Engines Can Create Reality

I try to avoid quoting other people’s opinions and articles on this blog, but over the weekend I found a newspaper article about the interaction of search engines and the stock market that was absolutely fascinating. It also seems like an appropriate topic with this week’s events on Wall Street.

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September 15, 2008

6 Reasons Not to Use Google SiteSearch

Quite a few people have been asking lately about the benefits of using Google SiteSearch.

In theory, it’s great idea because people can use Google’s own search engine to search your site without leaving it. There’s even a slick module that allows you do this easily on Joomla 1.5. This should produce more accurate results, right?

Wrong. Here’s six reasons why you’re better off using your own site search rather than relying on Google:

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September 11, 2008

Are Joomla Admin Templates Worthwhile?

In one of a series of guest posts here on the Alledia blog, Kyle Ledbetter of Joomlapraise.com asks whether admin templates are worth the effort.

Over at JoomlaPraise we make Joomla templates and extensions and have recently released AdminPraise, an administrator template for Joomla 1.5 that falls somewhere between a template and extension.

However, the question we’d like to ask is … do Joomla users want/need an alternate admin template? The admin template system is obviously in place for this reason, but no one really uses it. We’ve seen slight variations on the Khepri template, but that’s about it.

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September 11, 2008

Moving Joomla 1.0 Default SEF URLs to 1.5

This how-to came from a question posed by an SEO Club member:

“How I do move from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5 yet still keep all my /content/view/24/32 URLs?”

I’ve talked with him before and explained that redirecting URLs to a new version is a disaster. My experience it brings a 30 to 50% drop in traffic, so keeping these old URLs was vital.

I did some digging around and found the Backlink plugin. This is a great little tool that is almost completely unknown. I found only around 10 Joomla forum posts and a single blog entry about it which has since disappeared from Joomla.org. Fortunately I was able to dig out the Google cache of Sam Moffatt’s post which helped me understand how it worked. It’s really pretty simple, once you’ve migrated the content to 1.5:

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September 10, 2008

Beta Testers

Thank you very much indeed for agreeing to beta test our new product. This may come as surprise to some of you … others have been suggesting we do this for several months:

What is the product? An SEO-optimized Joomla 1.5 template that is quite literally the fastest Joomla template every made. Rather than try to add hundreds of extra features we have tried to strip out every single uneccessary feature to make the site run as quickly as possible.

Download: Click here to download.

The template is 1.5 only. The package contains a normal template .zip file, another with compressed CSS and finally a full Joomla 1.5.7 site with the template correctly set up.

Demo: Click here to see a live demo.

Feedback: Click here to send us your feedback.

If you have any questions at all, rather than direct feedback, please feel free to email us at [email protected]

Thanks again and we hope you like the template!

The Alledia.com Team