Steve’s Blog
Joomla Training Across the United States
Almost a year ago now we launched the Joomla SEO Club. It was a completely new concept at the time and for the last 11 months, I’ve been focused on making it flourish. I believe we’ve succeeded. Almost no-one was offering Joomla SEO services last year and now it’s a standard offering by many companies in the Joomla industry. Now it’s time to see if we can push the envelope once more and help meet other unaddressed customer needs. Starting today and continuing for the next few weeks, we plan to launch three significant new ventures here at Alledia. The…
Happy Third Birthday Joomla!
Happy Birthday Joomla! September 1st is the project’s 3rd birthday. You can read the original announcement from 2005 here. Only 10 days previously the domain name had been registered alongside several other alternatives that the team were considering. How far has the project come? We’re now reaching the point where a several percent of all the sites on the web are built with Open Source Content Management Systems. At the beginning of 2004, our industry barely existed:
Artio, SEF Advance and SEF Patch Guides
We’re delighted to announce three new areas in Extension Guides, our freshly-added 6th section to the SEO Club. These are easy-to-understand articles explaining how to use the most popular Joomla SEO extensions: Artio SEF SEF Advance SEF Patch for Joomla 1.0 The first extension that we covered is sh404SEF and that guide is getting longer and longer, partly that’s because it’s powerful and complex, but also because of great feedback from club members.
Serious IDevAffiliate Security Hole
This is an worrying security update that affects the Joomla world. Up until now iDevAffiliate – the system used by almost every Joomla affiliate program – has stored passwords and Social Security numbers UNENCRYPTED in the database. That means if you join an iDevAffiliate program the owner can go along and view your password whether its “12345”, “password” or something more personal. From there they can go back to your site, see other iDev programs that you’re using and try to login to those, pretending to be you. If you’re dumb enough to use the same login for your email…
Automatic Updates for Joomla
If you subscribe to the Joomla Extensions Directory RSS feed, you can see the future of Joomla pass before your eyes. Sure, there are a lot of "me-too" listings but at least once a week there’s something new and exciting. The latest extension to catch my eye is an automatic installer and updater. Its key selling point? It allows you to install just one extension and use that install and updates dozens of others. No more registering, downloading, uploading and looking out for updates.
An Early Warning System for Hacked Sites
After Joomla’s recent security issues, people have been double-checking their sites. In some cases it’s easy to tell if your site has been hacked (the large Turkish flag and blaring music are strong hints) and on other occasions, the hackers might leave no trace. One of my colleagues found a very subtle hack … his robots.txt file has been altered to block his entire site from being indexed by Google. The hack had been in place since June, causing him to lose all his rankings. It’s likely that this was a highly motivated rival rather than just another group of…
Big Discounts on Joomla Training
UPDATED: We have a few tickets sold out our Joomla Training in Atlanta, next weekend, Saturday August 23rd. However, we’ve opened registration for the next class on October 25th. Click here to sign up , and use the coupon "allediablog" for a $50 discount! In addition to the class, attendees get: Lunch and coffee / snacks throughout the day. Free membership to our SEO Club. Free copy of Barrie North’s best selling Joomla Admin Manual eBook. A flash drive full of tutorials and best-of-breed Joomla components. Coming up in December, we’re taking our training to Colorado and early birds get…
Change Joomla Can Believe In
Joomla.org has a new template today. The design looks a little similar to the website of another emerging new force in the United States. It’s also interesting to note that the ! has been dropped from most uses on the homepage, something most books and blogs have done for a while.
Joomla ECommerce Solutions Compared
I’ve made this chart after getting several requests in the last few days, all asking which Joomla E-Commerce they should use. There’s no right answer as the two main shopping carts, Virtuemart and iJoomla Digistore, are both very different. There are two other shopping carts available that look like they may become contenders: Freeway is an enhanced modification of osCommerce and thanks to Damian, the lead developer, I’ve been able to create a column for it also. IXXO is a commercial script I haven’t had the chance to fully test-drive yet. It costs nearly $300. If any major features have…