Back to the Mile-High City … We had the great fortune to be in Denver last year as winter arrived and the CMS Expo rolled into town. We’re back again next week with one of our day-long Joomla training classes. If you need to get up to speed quickly with Joomla, consider joining us next Wednesday in Denver. The class is just south of downtown in Denver’s main tech district and its on September 30th from 9 am to 4 pm.
This is a guest blog post by Edward Rid from Bestjoomladesign.com. Don’t forget that the official Joomla showcase site is also available at community.joomla.org On our website we’ve been trying collect examples of sites that can be inspiring to Jooma designers. Below is a short roundup of Joomla sites that have been already submitted to us. These designs illustrate the power of Joomla.
Over the last year our business model has evolved quite substantially. From being a traditional webdesign firm we’ve increasingly focused on Joomla training. After starting slowly last summer, we’re now holding up to 15 classes per month. We’re proud to announce that we’ve scheduled our 100th Joomla class. We’ve also decided to make it special. The 100th class will be completely free to non-profit or charity organizations.
Sometimes its hard to think of ideas for a blog post, so here are ten topics that will guarantee a really popular Joomla article: Why Drupal sucks Why WordPress sucks Why Drupal and WordPress both suck Why the GPL is great Why the GPL sucks Compare rival extensions (the developers are sure to chime in) Start charging money for a previously free extension Someone at Joomla.org doesn’t think I’m right in everything I say Someone at Joomla.org didn’t answer my email within 5 minutes of me sending it Write a useful tutorial (wait … that sounds a little too constructive…
Back in March I was able to test iJoomla.com’s new SEO component called, somewhat appropriately: iJoomla SEO. It didn’t impress me much. You weren’t able to add metadata to menu links or third-party extensions which meant that the homepage and many key sites pages were missed. 6 months later and a new version arrived, so I gave it a spin. My opinion this time was much different:
For several months now I’ve been hinting that we have a major geographic domain name to launch on Joomla. Well, life got in the way … the Joomla training classes became really popular, we had other sites to launch and almost everyone we work with is having a baby this year. So, although its missing a lot of features that are currently unpublished and being worked on, its time to soft-launch AppalachianTrail.com. The A.T. is huge, running all the way along the eastern side of the U.S.. It starts in Maine, up by the Canada border, and finishes down in…
Student: “What’s going on with Joomla 1.6?” Steve: “User management is going to get more sophisticated, you won’t be restricted to sections and categories for articles any more.” Student: “OK, but these guys are volunteers, right? How much have they got done? When can I see what it’ll look like?” Steve: “Errrrrr ….. ummmm …… when I get back I’ll take some screenshots of the current Alpha version and write a blog about it.”
One of the confusing things for anyone optimizing a Joomla site is that there are so many options out there. We ran a Joomla SEO class in Atlanta last week and one thing became clear … it was easy to grasp that there are several SEO extensions available and several issues that they fixed with Joomla. The problem was … which extensions fixed which things? This chart is an attempt to make that much more straight-forward:
Its time for us to put the coffee on and get some more Red Bull … starting tomorrow we’ll have a really busy week over at Joomla Training. In total, there are 8 classes in 8 days coming up on the JoomlaTraining.com schedule, including 3 in the Mid-West, 2 in Texas and 3 in the South-East. Mid-West All three classes are led by our expert teacher, Rod Martin. They take place at the beautiful Mets Center on the Ohio and Kentucky border, right next door the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. About four tickets are left for each of these classes:…
Back in October 2008 we released Bolt which we marketed as “The World’s Fastest Joomla Template”. Several other template developers asked for copies to test against their own work, but the results were clear. Nearly 10 months later, someone has come along and beaten that mark. We’re proud of course that a company with 12 full-time template designers feels the need to compete with 2 guys working in their spare-time. I kind of wonder what took these professional developers so long? 😉 Since we released Bolt a lot of other companies such as YooTheme have worked on making their heavy…