Steve’s Blog

Drupal’s Founder Tries to Emulate Red Hat

Acquia DrupalCan 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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Joomla Training Class in Washington

Joomla Training in WashingtonA 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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How can the Joomla 15 Admin Process Be Improved?

Joomla Control PanelIn 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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6 Reasons Not to Use Google SiteSearch

Google SiteSearchQuite 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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Are Joomla Admin Templates Worthwhile?

Joomla Praise Admin TemplateIn 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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Moving Joomla 1.0 Default SEF URLs to 1.5

Joomla Backlink PluginThis 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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Sponsored Review of Forums-Free.com

This is a sponsored review from errr .. SponsoredReviews.com.
I don’t do many of these before, but I’m working late, watching a soccer / football games to start and doing a review seems like fun. There are several
requests waiting so it only seemed fair to tackle the first one in the
list … Forums-Free.com.

The site is, as the name implies, a free forum hosting website. It allows you to create forum boards with phpBB3. Its a free forum but is it any good?

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Beta Testers

Bolt Joomla TemplateThank 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

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Adding No Follow to Joomla Menu Links

If you don’t want pages to indexed by search engines, it’s standard SEO practice to add rel=”nofollow” on links to that page. Pages you might not want indexed include “Terms and Conditions”, “Privacy Policy” and other pages that contains content you don’t want to rank for.

However, inside Joomla core, nofollow is not an option for menu links. At the request of some SEO Club members, and with some smart help from Brian Teeman, we’ve modified the Joomla menu module to allow no-following of links.

How to Use

  1. Upload the new module
  2. Publish this in place of mod_mainmenu
  3. Whenever you want to use no-follow, simply select “On Click, Open in: New Window in Browser Navigation”

Why a New Module and Not a Patch?

Simple – to make it easier to upgrade. With hack attempts rising lately, its important to upgrade as smoothly and easily as possible.

Doesn’t the SEF Patch, sh404SEF etc. do this?

No. They add the no-follow to the metadata of the page being linked to. This actually adds no-follow to the menu link itself. Click here for more details on the differences between no follow, meta no follow and robots.txt.

Downloads

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