The technical side of Joomla SEO can be summed up in one sentence: keep your URLs under control. Joomla really is a powerful tool for creating content-rich websites but its also easy to end up with a whole lot of useless URLs. In today’s post, we’ll use MosTree as an example of how to manage Joomla URLs, using the wonderful sounding robots.txt file.
A simple tip today. This small Joomla code hack is designed to help those of you who have a lot of people submitting content to their site. Everyone writes and submits in their own way, so its easy to end up with some contributors just writing a single line in the "intro" box and others entering their whole article. With this hack, it doesn’t matter. You can cut off all frontpage items with a "Read More…" after 200 words, giving your site a clean, professional look.
JoomlaCode.org was released last week, and it was a major step forward for Joomla. Despite this good news the story didn’t make it far beyond the Joomla community. Amy Stephen posted on her blog, urging people to vote for it on Digg.com, but the story ended up with 40 votes. That’s about 10% of the votes normally needed to make the Digg frontpage. That poor showing got me asking a simple question….Why aren’t Open Source projects more sucessfull on social news sites?
Today, we’re delighted to have the chance to talk with Ryan Szrama who has just announced the launch of Ubercart, a new E-Commerce platform for Drupal. In our comparison between Drupal and Joomla, we noted that one of Drupal’s major drawbacks was its lack of strong ecommerce capabilities. After today’s very promising Alpha release, Ubercart looks as if it has the potential to solve that problem. Ryan very kindly took the time to explain more about the who?, why? and what? of Ubercart.
One of the most? frequently asked questions on the Joomla forums is “What is the Itemid and what does it do?”. Its something that frustrates even experienced developers … witness the post called “Damn you, infernal item IDs!!!” on WhyJoomla.com. I thought a quick tutorial would be useful and along the way we can break down other aspects of Joomla URLs.
We’re delighted to announce the launch of Joomla South East, which is one of a growing number of Joomla User Groups around the world. We aim to have our first meeting(s) in Atlanta but also to reach out to current and potential Joomla users around the South East of the United States. If you’re interested, please sign up at JoomlaSouthEast.com. Then you can go to the forum and help us work out where and when we can first meet as Joomla South East!
Today saw the end of something that has bugged me for a whole year – our Yellow Pages contract. Wow, that’s an expensive, useless heap of nothing for a webdesign company. After two years of growing the company, mainly by word-of-mouth, this time last year I decided that we might be able to expand our local customer base by advertising in the Yellow Pages. I was wrong – embarrasingly so. We have had precisely five calls. None of those people were doing anything more than trying to find out general pricing.
People signing up at Alledia in weeks to come are going to have one extra field to fill in. Recently, we’ve seen a sharp jump in the number of fake registrations and so over the weekend we added a captcha to our registration form. This problem isn’t growing because Joomla or Community Builder have security problems, but it can be simply explained by what we’ll call "Spam’s Law": The amount of spam a software product receives is directly proportional to its popularity.
Regular readers of my blog must think I’m going at bit cuckoo of late, repeatedly quoting from a 20-year old book written by a guy born in 1911. No apologies – David Ogilvy’s book “Ogilvy on Advertising” is a classic. The man himself spent more time in the research department than on the creative team during his early years. He developed an heavier reliance on research and hard data than almost all his competitors:
Hi All Apologies for skipping the regular post today – we’ve been busy moving all our company and clients sites to a dedicated server. Some of our clients run sports sites and are about to get hit hard by traffic from March Madness (something I’m still learning to understand and love as a Brit) and others are also doing really well, growing steadily on a month-to-month basis. It was time to upgrade our hosting capacity. Thanks to the following people whose speedy help made the move much easier: Chris at Rochen.com Emir at Sakic.net Bernhard at XHTMLSuite.com We’ll be back…