Steve’s Blog

July 9, 2007

Add your Virtuemart Products to Froogle

I’m very careful about recommending products on this blog, plugging only about 10% of the stuff that gets sent. Thats mainly because so many developers harvest email addresses and send out a mass mailing. Just a two-line, personalised message and a sample of the product is enough to get my interest. It also helps if something comes from a friend who doesn’t know you’re going to give them a mention. Today, I got a very pleasant surprise from Ian from NewWorldDesigns.co.uk, who’ve worked with for a long time. His first commercial product came out today and its a great start…

July 4, 2007

Joomla Extension of the Month – July 07

This month’s award goes to one of the best Joomla extensions and one that is almost certainly the most under-appreciated. JACLPlus is a hack that allows you to create an unlimited number of new user groups and give them fine-grained access to different content areas on your Joomla site. It works with a few extra components such as Docman and Repository, but by-and-large it is a solution for improving user access to the core of Joomla. Instead of simply restricting people according to "public" or "registered", you can now create user levels of a complexity that rivals Why is JACLPlus…

July 3, 2007

Automapping and Duplicate Content

This post is a follow-up to our previous discussion of automapping, and why it can be really useful in helping you avoid duplicate content problems on your Joomla site. For those of still thinking about how to handle duplicate content, head on over to the official word from Google. One of their key tips is "Understand your CMS". As the saying goes, "a bad workman blames his tools." Joomla sites can rank well but to make that happen you do need to understand something about how they work. If you haven’t already, make sure you understand what Itemids are and…

July 2, 2007

Can Some Domains Extensions Hurt your SEO?

There’s a great thread over at Domainstate.com, reacting to the news that ICANN, who control top-level domains on the Internet, have decided to create yet more extensions. After the runaway success of .aero, .coop, .museum and .name, people are clearly desperate for more. DomainState offered their ideas in the form of a fake press release:

June 29, 2007

Adding Comments to GroupJive

Ok – time to walk the walk. Yesterday, I praised GroupJive and said how important I though it was for the future of social networking with Joomla. I also mentioned that until this week, not enough people had been contributing. Today, we’ll show you had to add a useful feature to GroupJive – posting comments on all group messages.

June 28, 2007

GroupJive Springs Back to Life

Sad but true. When our clients ask for social networking we almost always them advise them to use Drupal. Its user profile system is comparable to Joomla’s Community Builder, but Drupal is a better choice because of its immensely powerful groups system. Using Organic Groups, Drupal users can create and manage their own groups, adding on dozens of other features from forums and blogs to photo galleries and even registrations. If Joomla is going to compete for social networking sites, it needs groups. It needs Group Jive, the one extension attempting to meet that need. Unfortunately, things haven’t looked good…

June 26, 2007

Review of Heavenly Titles Module

One of Joomla’s inbuilt SEO flaws is how it handles page titles. The titles of your Joomla page probably look like this: <td class="contentheading" width="100%">My Page Title</td> That makes about as much sense as wrapping up the paragraphs on your page with code like this: <td class="paragraph" width="100%">This is my paragraph and it rambles on and on….</td>. Whats wrong with <p> and </p>? Fortunately Joomla does use <p> and </p> but it doesn’t utilise <h1> and </h1>. Fortunately, there’s a new module that offers a potential solution….

June 25, 2007

New Joomla SEO Forum

As promised – we have a major bonus available today for Joomla SEO eBook Subscribers. We’ve opened a new Joomla SEO Forum. Over the next few months, we’ll build the forum into the most comprehensive Joomla ranking resource on the web. What does this mean for you? Existing SEO eBook Subscribers You receive free lifetime membership to all areas of the forum. You can download the SEO eBook whenever you want from the forum. Future SEO eBook Subscribers You can join the forum and subscribe to have access to the SEO eBook. The price of the book is not changing…

June 21, 2007

SEF URL Updates

Some quick updates from the world of Search Engine Friendly URL extensions for Joomla: Emir has added automapping to SEF Advance which is a great and much-needed extra feature. Plus, he now as an sef_ext.php file for Fireboard ready. Open SEF has closed at J-Prosolution.com and has been reposted on Joomla.org as NuSEF. Artio.cz have upgraded JoomSEF to version 1.5.1 and are starting to provide control over metadata and page titles. Finally, we’re continuing to test sh404SEF on live sites and are finding it to be a great, stable SEF extension. Highly recommended.

June 20, 2007

Some Thoughts on GPL Business Models

A warning in advance – today’s blog post is a little disconnected. It is really a collection of thoughts I’ve had as people struggle through the question of “How 3rd party developers make money in the GPL’ed Joomla world?” Size matters. Successful GPL models will probably need to be based on large and very important applications. I can imagine that Community Builder, Virtuemart and Fireboard would be the extensions that are in the best position to move towards a subscription model. However, all of those are currently GPL so I’m left struggling to find examples of non-GPL extensions that are…