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Get 20% off Joomlashack Clubs

05.06.11

Joomlashack is having a great sale until midnight Friday June 3rd! Get 20% of the Joomlashack Developer club or Joomlashack University and 10-15% off templates and extensions.

There are only two spots left in our beginner/intermediate Joomla training class in Hartford, CT on September 17th.

As well as a full day of expert Joomla instruction, all students will leave with goodies worth over $400!

Books:
Joomla! A User's Guide Videos
9+ hours of professional Joomla training video
Club Memberships:
50% off SEO Club Subscription - Alledia SEO Club (up to $125 value)
50% off - Joomlashack Developer Club ($25[...]

On September 1, we celebrated Joomla's 6th birthday. In September 2005, Joomla's 20-odd founders forked the Mambo project and established Joomla. Six years later, Joomla is one of the three top open source content management systems in the world. The founders had no idea that Joomla would be so successful, but six years later, thousands of people all over the world make their living with Joomla, and millions more update a Joomla website every day.

Joomla 1.5.11 has been released, and it includes security patches, so its important to update. But getting your Joomla site upgraded to the new version can be tricky, especially if you are using FTP.

Fortunately, there is an easier way, check out Joomlashack's tutorial How to Update Joomla 1.5 Versions.

You'll need SSH access, and remember to back up first!

Of course, if you want to never have to bother with updating Joomla or your extensions ever again, you can try [...]

A few years ago, fluid width templates were all the rage. Accessibility guys loved them, and it was cool to grab the corner of your browser window and see all that content slide around. Heck, my original Joomla template tutorial published at joomla.org even showed you how to make them. We even sold templates that had the more advanced "jello layout" (fixed side columns and fluid middle). But now, at Joomlashack, we don't make fluid templates, but focus on fixed width templates. I firmly believe they are misplaced on today's web. Drupal extensions, on the whole, tend to have higher quality coding than Joomla ones... Did I just say that? Me? Mr "every website is a nail" Joomla?* Yup If your are looking for a different editor for your Joomla 1.5 based website, you should really check out the best free editor JoomlaFCK, read here more about this great Plugin.

You are reading a post from: Joomla SEO Blog by PathosSeoBlog.com

The JoomlaFCK Editor for Joomla 1.5 out now! | Joomla Editor

I'm pleased to announce that Phil Locke, a recent addition to the OSM Board of Directors, has been appointed Capital Committee Chair today.  His efforts will be critical to the project's success in income generation, and I'm excited to have him leading our team in this role.

Here's a quick overview of this position's responsibilities.

Capital Committee Chair

Leader of all income generation efforts by OSM
Manages a team of individuals that ensure the success of OSM's fundraising, sponsorships, advertising, and partnerships
Communicates with the OSM team regularly regarding the outcomes of activities
Liaises with the other leadership teams where appropriate to leverage internal resources in an effort to make campaigns successful
Liaises with the community to harvest new ideas, obtain feedback on campaigns, and spread income generating efforts wider
Ensures the satisfaction of our sponsors

Phil has expressed to me that he'll be following up with the community soon with his vision for immediate next steps.  Congratulations Phil, and thank you for leading up on this important effort!

Discuss this post on the Joomla! People site.

I received a review copy of Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia from Packt Publishers and was expecting to read a lot that I already knew about Images and the image manager in Joomla!. But instead it was an eye-opener about the possibilities that Joomla! and some special extensions gives you to create a complete multimedia experience for your [...]

You are reading a post from: Joomla SEO Blog by PathosSeoBlog.com

Joomla Multimedia – A Book Review about Images, Video and More…

It's 2011 and it's a great time to start a freelance web design business. What's even better is to do it providing services for open source CMSs, like, say, Joomla! To help a budding freelancer start 2011 firing on all cylinders, I have gathered a massive giveaway drawing packed with subscriptions, hosting, books and clubs worth thousands of dollars. Will you be the lucky one? Read on to find out how to enter the drawing.

Much is happening in the Joomla community! Get the latest on upcoming events, interesting threads, latest news, and what to watch for in the week ahead. Did you hear about the new Joomla Template Directory? If not, be sure to read on... Superior SEO + limitless flexibility + seamless JomSocial styling = Joomlashack's new template, JS Community! Built on our powerful CSS 960 grid framework, JS Community is a sleek yet sophisticated approach to design. It comes loaded with over 30 module positions, multiple source-ordered column layouts, easy to customize CSS files, and much more! And most exciting- JS Community is ready for JomSocial, the best social networking extension available for Joomla. Need to offer community tools to your audience but want a consistent, seamless look and feel? Try out our demo and see how JomSocial and JS Community work together for a perfect social networking experience. JS Community is chock full of powerful, state-of-the-art features. Check out Community's full bag of tricks, including:

thumb_screen I've been a huge fan of Drupal's Content Creation Kit for a long time - its a module that extends the core content functionality of Drupal, allowing you to create different types of 'content' - made up of a variety of fields such as embedded media (photo/video/etc...), email links, html/web links and so on.  CCK's architecture is scalable and allows for 3rd party developers to add new fields to it as additional modules; so the usefullness of CCK grows exponentially in time.

Actually, for a time I saw this amazing module really setting joomla and drupal apart - as, Joomla felt really limited in its potential to grow beyond a CMS and become let's say, an 'application framework.'  However, I'm excited to report today that this is all about to change...

The Joomla project recently reached its 10 millionth download of its popular CMS, a great milestone for the project, and in only 4 years.

Last year I estimated that over 30 million sites use Joomla, though obviously that number must be bigger now.

Interestingly enough, last month I also did some work breaking down the trends of 1.0 to 1.5 downloads of Joomla, you can see the results in this graph.

Monthly 1.0 and 1.5 downloads of joomla  So we're now about one week into the stable cycle for Joomla! 1.6 and it seems that the biggest question that is on people's minds is upgrading/migration. There is a great deal of interest from people who want to keep their existing sites, but who also want to try out the latest and greatest features that Joomla! 1.6 has to offer.

When the Production Leadership Team met in San Francisco last September, the release of Joomla! 1.6 was one of the big topics we had to grapple with.  We had made good progress already, but there was still a good amount of work to be done.

Given the situation we found ourselves in, together with the fact that there was already a community member (Matias Aguirre) who was working on a migration tool, we decided that it was better to support the effort already in progress than to spend time duplicating what was already in progress.

So, the bottom line is this:

Migration to Joomla! 1.6 - We recommend people interested in migrating to use Matias Aguirre's jUpgrade extension.  Testing and feedback from the community will play an important role in perfecting this extension.
Migration to the July 2011 release - We are planning to implement a site importer in this release that will allow you to import your data from either Joomla! 1.5 or Joomla! 1.6.
As per the Development Strategy, we intend to manage change much more carefully moving forward. This, combined with our shortened release cycle means that upgrades and migrations will go a lot smoother. 
Joomla! 1.5 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release. This means that it will be supported for approximately 15 more months. That makes the estimated date for End of Life of Joomla! 1.5 to be April 11, 2012.
The next LTS release will take place in January of 2012.

Joomla! 1.6 not only marks the introduction of major features that people have been waiting for (granular access control, unlimited category depth), but also the shift to a new development strategy that will enable us to release continual updates on a regular basis while making the upgrade process as painless as possible.

Just got back from a great two days at the 2009 Chicago CMS Expo. It was great to see dev's from Drupal and Plone rubbing shoulders with the Joomla regulars.

I had an opportunity to have a quick interview with SDRnews, and gave away some pre-release copies of the Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide (2nd Edition)

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Mooing Forward With Joomla! 1.5

17.06.10

Since the release of Mootools 1.2, we have found ourselves facing a rather difficult question - what do you do with the 1.5 core?  Unfortunately, the changes that came in Mootools 1.2 were significant enough that backwards compatibility with Mootools 1.1 was a difficult task.  I like to compare it to the difference between Joomla! 1.0 and Joomla! 1.5.  We did a lot of house cleaning and made our framework much smoother and much cleaner.

Such is the case for Mootools 1.1 and Mootools 1.2.  The new Mootools represents a significant step forward.

As a result, Joomla! developers have found themselves in a difficult position. Do you use the outdated version of Mootools, thereby reducing compatibility issues and making life easier for users, or do you use the new version and attempt one of a variety methods of overriding the core framework.

We hope to change all of that in the near future.

As has been previously mentioned, it is our plan to give Joomla! 1.5 an upgrade to Mootools 1.2.  This will allow developers to take advantage of the improvements that this new version offers and to write code that will endure into the future.

We have set a target release date of July 15, 2010 for Joomla! 1.5 with Mootools 1.2.

The Gory Details

I previously released an upgrade plugin for people to test out which replaced the core JHtmlBehavior class. This plugin implemented the JHtmlBehavior::framework method that has been added in trunk. The Mootools upgrade that will be included with Joomla! 1.5 will follow along in this direction.

After the 1.5 update is uploaded, the plugin will be installed the first time an administrator logs into the administrator panel.  They will also be presented with a message asking them if they would like to enable the plugin. Once the plugin is enabled the site will then be using Mootools 1.2.

When the plugin is enabled whenever the framework Mootools library is loaded Mootools 1.2 will be loaded with the compatibility layer.

The hope is that even with the upgrade activated, there will be no negative impact on sites. However, in the event that the upgrade does cause problems, it will be easy for administrators to disable the plugin and restore their site to the previous state.

We're excited about this development and are grateful to the folks at Mootools who have worked with us to provide a compatibility layer that could make this possible.

The code is a work in progress. If you would like to check it out you are free to check it out from http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/branches/mt12.

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Building custom forms - whats the best extension?

05.01.10

For some reason Joomla core has never natively been able to create custom forms - I'm not sure if this is due to it originally (pre-1.5 releases) allowing non-article content types to sit in the usual database tables that comprise your site, or something else... However, for years there have been multiple extensions floating around that could let you create forms out of basic elements, like text, email and file fields.

The most basic use of such extensions would be to get rid of Joomla's too-simple contact form system.  To do just that it seems that today there are a good 4 or 5 extensions sitting in the extensions directory that could help you out, though the more digging you do the more you'll find discrepancies between them.  Choosing the right form extension should be done with a balance of features to look for, such as:

A highly active and focused extension developer,
A multitude of fields already supported,
A large user base,
Development of the extension with long-term focus; if the extension has been created to allow the developer to just create 1 or 2 forms on his/her website, it may not be able to do more in the future (given that their initial need for it was satisfied).

Back in 2007 I mentioned the release of a new extension called Fabrik - after spending some time comparing notes between a bunch of form components just now I am back in love with it!  You see, Fabrik takes the approach of forms being essential things for application-building - meaning that with Fabrik, you can create forms to not only email somewhere but store in your database which in turn can be displayed as lists through your site - you you can, for example, use it to build things like a custom library listing of books.

Fabrik was around before last year's CCK-in-joomla copycating began and is interesting in not replacing Joomla's core article content-type but side-stepping it with a flexible system for handling custom content that supports custom theming and additional plug-in support (yes, you can make your own field types).

Already available fields for forms created with Fabrik include; user details, captcha (with recaptcha!), text areas/fields, file uploads, images, database joins and more (including text displays to annotate fields - for 'help' purpose)...

I highly recommend popping over to http://fabrikar.com and checking Fabrik out... Be sure to also pour through their forums to answer any queries you may have before installing/getting started.  If you think there's a simpler, more powerful, or otherwise better form extension out there drop a comment below!

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