Steve’s Blog

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:

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:

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…

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.

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.