Steve’s Blog

October 16, 2008

Joomla SEO Templates

Breeze – the World’s Easiest Joomla Template It’s named “Breeze” because it’s so speedy and lightweight and because installing is a “breeze”. Here’s how to set it up: Install Joomla Upload Breeze Upload your logo Enjoy your template! It’s that easy! Besides all the simplicity, this also a ridiculously fast template. Depending on how it?s configured, it can use as little as 4 HTTP requests and 15kb between CSS, graphics, and HTML. 6 different color options 12 different module options Compressed, lightweight CSS Only 2 images, both highly optimized Bolt – the World’s Fastest Joomla Template The Bolt template is…

October 15, 2008

Joomla Code Commits vs Drupal and WordPress

Someone mentioned to me this week that they were worried about Joomla because not much work was being done on the project’s code. To reassure them I headed over to Ohloh.net which keeps useful data on the amount of work done on open source projects. What I found was that work on Joomla proceeds very differently from both Drupal and WordPress: Where as those projects are built incrementally with small changes, Joomla has great bursts of energy followed by relatively quiet periods. We’re just on of those plateaus now as the project gets ready for Joomla 1.6. Joomla has had…

October 14, 2008

Official Support Will End for Joomla 1.0

Official support for Joomla 1.0 will end in 281 days. That announcement was made by Wilco Jansen on joomla.org. July 22, 2009 will be the two year anniversary of the first Joomla 1.5 release, and it seems an appropriate day to move forward. I’m sure this is a popular decision within the Joomla team and also with third-party devs who can concentrate on developing for just one version. Mathias from JoomlaTools was one person pushing for this to happen. It’s probably less popular with the thousands of people who still use Joomla 1.0. However, there’s no reason to get worried.…

October 9, 2008

Hitting the Open Source Wall

Hitting the wall: “In endurance sports, particularly cycling and running, hitting the wall describes the condition when an athlete suddenly loses energy“. (via Wikipedia) Hitting the open source wall: “In building a project, particularly when giving it away free, hitting the wall describes the condition when an project suddenly loses energy“. (via me)

October 6, 2008

Discussion of SEO for Fireboard Forums

I hope this will be the first of a series of open discussions focusing on popular Joomla extensions. A very smart SEO Club member ( Suchmaschinenoptimierung Joomla ) helped me brainstorm a list of things to be aware of when optimizing a site with Fireboard. I’m going to give those here and then turn if over to you guys for any other tips, tricks or problems that you have. 1) Using ‘RE:’ for All Replies This is an example of one page with two URLs, a clear duplicate content problem: forums/general/form-search-not-working forums/general/re-form-search-not-working Solution: go to administrator / components / com_fireboard…

October 1, 2008

Training for Joomla in Tampa, Florida

If you read the Alledia blog regularly you know we’re doing training for Joomla beginners across the eastern, southern and mid-USA. You can find a full list of classes on JoomlaTraining.com. Each week, with about 2 months before the class, we’re giving a rundown of the training in each city. We’ve covered the November 7th class in Washington D.C. and the class a week later in New York City. The third and final one I’ll cover is a session in Tampa on Saturday November 22nd. A quick note: we took a shot at teaching in 5 cities. Washington, New York,…

September 30, 2008

Why Caching Your Joomla Site is So Useful

For about a week this month there were problems with the cache component we use here on Alledia.com. I turned it off while we tried to bugshoot the issue. We also use Pingdom.com to track whether our sites are offline and also how fast they’re responding. When I logged in today, I found a stellar argument for why caching your Joomla site is so important: Alledia.com loads twice as quickly with the cache turned on.

September 29, 2008

Managed Hosting for Joomla Sites

Last week, I discussed Acquia which provides managed commercial grade support for Drupal sites. This week, I’m going to talk about some companies that don’t quite have $7 million in their back pocket, but are creating new support and hosting products for Joomla. I’m always fascinated by new business models in the Joomla world, so I’ll let the leaders of these two projects explain what they’re up to:

September 24, 2008

Training for Joomla in New York City

If you read the Alledia blog regularly you know we’re doing training for Joomla beginners across the eastern, southern and mid-USA. You can find a full list of classes on JoomlaTraining.com. Each week, with about 2 months before the class, we’re giving a rundown of the training in each city. Last week we covered the November 7th class in Washington D.C.. The second class is a week later in New York City – downtown Manhattan to be precise.

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: