Currently people building websites with Joomla are in an odd situation. There’s no upgrade path from Joomla 1.0.12 to Joomla 1.5, so we need to make a choice. Do we recommend the current stable version or do we ask customers to be patient and wait for the new, shiny updated Joomla?
The web still has lots of carry-overs from the real-world. Think of the way the names given to so many online items, such as folders, bookmarks, pages and tabs. They comfort people by reminding them of a real-world office. As people become more comfortable online we can dispense with some key 20th century ideas. Among these, perhaps the most useless of all is the Archive. Back in the day, when we needed row-upon-row of dusty filing cabinets to store the information of a single organization, archives were a neccessary evil. In the online world, they’re next to useless. Allow me…
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how Wikipedia dominates almost every search result delivered by Google: Search for Joomla, and Wikipedia is there at #3. Search for Drupal and Wikipedia is there at #3. Search for Moodle and Wikipedia is there at #4. Search for WordPress and Wikipedia is there at #8. It seems the only way to escape Wikipedia’s clutches is to be too unimportant to be included. Recently, I’ve noticed a rival creeping up the rankings ….
There really are only two business models in the world and one of them is soon going to die.
In previous blog posts, I’ve talked about how Joomla can create lots of duplicate content pages and wreak havoc with your Search Engine rankings. Today, we’ll deal with a major culprit.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve started to notice a new branding trend: companies with famous logos are leveraging their brand recognition to promote their websites. I first saw this watching a TV show on NBC (for those of you outside of the States, NBC is the channel that launched Friends, Seinfield and Cheers). Just before the commercial break, the NBC logo flashed up with .com beside it. They didn’t tell you what their web address was. They just assumed you’d work it out.
This month’s Extension of the Month has caused more excitement about a component release than almost anything else I can remember in the short history of Joomla. Fireboard has caused people to sit up and pay attention because it is the sucessor to Joomlaboard which had been the only fully-integrated forum for Joomla.
My friend Scott over at FishSEO, has pointed out that a new WordPress theme generator is available. The script gives you remarkable control over everything from the position and color of the sidebar to the color of almost every kind of text on the page. When you’re done, you can just click “save” and your finished theme will be downloaded as a .zip file.
If I could sum up Joomla SEO in the shortest possible way, it would be "control your URLs". Over the course of analyzing many Joomla sites, I’ve seen all sorts of wierd URLs. Sometimes it will be a third part extension creating them, sometimes it will be an internal Joomla flaw, sometimes it will just remain inexplicable. This is a problem, because if you have a lot of extra URLs, Google is likely to reduce its indexing of your site. Fortunately, knowledge is power and if you know what problems you have, they are not to difficult to solve. In…
For those of you that haven’t read it yet, there’s a fascinating post over on the Joomla forums, that touches on many crucial questions for the project. The thread started innocuously when one member posted a “Things I don’t like about Joomla” list. In trying to answer them, lead developer Johan Jansseens mentioned that, “Encryption of Joomla! extensions is a violation of the GPL”. This generated more questions than it answered, because many Joomla components are encrypted and thus potentially violating the Joomla! license.