Steve’s Blog

A Proposal to Move Joomla Forward

This is a post that’s been lying around in various forms as a draft for over a year. I’ve dusted it off and decided to publish after the series of announcements made by the Joomla team over Christmas. The announcements were about decisions concerning the Joomla Extensions Directory where I’m an editor. The decisions were to remove extensions that were for Joomla 1.0 only, weren’t licensed under the GPL or violated Joomla’s trademark. Over the holidays, I’ve been talking closely with people who agree with the decisions and those who don’t. There are a good number of people on both…

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3000 Comments and a Special Prize

In June this year we reached 2000 comments on the Alledia blog. It took us about 18 months and over 400 blog posts to get there. We’re now nearly at 3000 comments, and it took only another 6 months. As with the 2000 mark, whoever posts number 3000 will get a free lifetime SEO Club membership. We’re at 2975 right now, so 25 more to go …. Thanks to everyone who has commented and guest-posted over the last 2 years. Enjoy the holidays!

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Open Question Joomla Holiday Coupons

Ho-ho-ho, and happy holidays to everyone. Here’s a round-up of this year’s holiday offers from lots of Joomla companies. Alledia – 25% with coupon “allediaxmas” extended until New Years Day Joomla Training – 25% with coupon “allediaxmas” extended until New Years Day SEF Advance – 25% until New Year Simplweb – 33% until 300 members JoomlaPraise – 25% with coupon “jollyfellow” until New Year JoomlaBamboo – 20% with coupon “xmas08” JomSocial – $30 with coupon “hol8day” Phil Taylor – 33% off everything until New Year Open Source Support Desk – 10% with coupon “HOLIDAY08” XHTMLSuite.com – 20% with coupon “joomla-xmas-holiday”…

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TimesSquare.com and Epson Both Run Joomla

Getting ready for New Years Eve? We’ve got the perfect Joomla site for you … TimesSquare.com. The site ranks #1 in Google for “Times Square” and is a 1.0 site using JomComment, SEF Advance and Tagbot among others. The site has information on a lot more than just New Years Eve, but they do have a whole section of the simply dedicated to that night.

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Bolt Template Now Has No Conflict Guarantee

Our goal for you is simplicity. For this first time ever in the Joomla-world … we’re offering a 100% money-back guarantee if our template has script conflicts with any Joomla extension. I hope this doesn’t make us broke, but hopefully its a useful and practical promise … You don’t want to waste your time figuring out what works with what. You just want to get up and running.   We guarantee Bolt will work first time with any extension … or just ask us for a refund. We’re not aiming to compete with other template developers when it comes to…

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Burger King’s Tasty Joomla Site

Alright, I’m obssessed – I love seeing Joomla used for large mainstream sites. Here’s a tasty Burger King promotion called BKHotKicks.com. It used the “Hot or Not” extension for people to vote on their favorite sneakers. The site was done for a 6 week-long competition and has not been taken offline. Hat tip to Steven. See the full list of Joomla sites for major companies here. Feel free to e-mail with any sites you see to [email protected].

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The Dangers of Bland Text

My favorite discussion at the CMS Expo was during the basic SEO class. We ended up talking about bland, happy talk on websites: "We provide first-class widgets to satisfied clients", "We offer premier widget solutions to our clients" and other such meaningless, corporate text. People came up with some great examples and we saw that webdesign companies are the often the biggest offenders:

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5 Thoughts from the CMS Expo

1) Organization Wow – outstanding. Both Expos have run like clockwork. If you think Open Source people are flakes, you haven’t seen an event organized by John, Linda and their team from Chicago. 2) Core + Commercial It was great to see Anthony from the Joomla core in attendance. Hopefully we’ll see commercial developers at April’s Joomla Day in Las Vegas.

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Open Question: New Holiday Discoveries?

Got to be honest, as a Brit in the United States, Thanksgiving has always been a turkey of a holiday. It always seemed like Christmas-lite a few weeks early. People watch sports, sleep, eat turkey and even listen to Christmas songs. Besides, it also messes up the school semester. Kids work for 12 weeks without a break, have Thanksgiving and then go back for just another 3 weeks. If I ever pull an Arnold Schwarzenegger and run for office, I’ll propose moving Thanksgiving to middle of October. Anyway, this year I finally saw the point … it’s a few days…

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