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Joomla 1.7: Expanded User Profiles

03.09.11

How many times have you built a site, and your client asked you for some additional information about users who register for the site? They wanted to collect their mailing address, date of birth, a favorite book, or even they just wanted them to accept the terms of service. Unfortunately, in Joomla 1.5, you would have had to install a complex extension like Community Builder to acheive this functionality. Now, however, it's built into Joomla 1.7.  

Since the start of the Joomla! Project we have had an Events Team.  This team created the Joomla!Day Charter and helped create the first of many Joomla!Days. Over time, the Joomla!Day organizers became more professional and the help of the Events Team was not as necessary.

Without a clear description of responsibilities or concept as to what this team should or can do, activities have reached a very low level: near zero, if we try to paraphrase it a little bit.

On the other hand, we have a lot of things in terms of events to do and to optimise. With this request for help I’ll try to fill the gaps.

At Joomlashack, we know that as on online business, email deliverability is very important. Whether sending newsletters or transactional emails from systems, they won't do much good if they don't reach people's inbox.

We use iContact for our newsletters, and have had great success with it. Recently though, we have been looking at supplementing it with another system for our transactional emails/ecommerce etc.

Once interesting alternative is Infusionsoft, which has a rich API, and ecommerce functionality built right in.

But what about deliverability?

Mr Tester.... start your engines!

iContact have recently released the second version of their API, and along with it, Joomlashack has upgraded our popular email component for Joomla we call JContact.

JContact is a great way to integrate world class email marketing into Joomla site registration, and its the only one to do it with best industry practices of subscriber opt in!

iContact were also running a contest for API applications, and we are excited to announce that Joomlashack grabbed second place!

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For a long time I&#39;ve wondered why commenting on articles hasn&#39;t been a stock feature in Joomla.&nbsp; For the most part, I think probably 90% of websites today use the function as an essential way to allow publishers to communicate with their audience and gain valuable feedback from them.

Joomla&#39;s Extensions directory lists over 30 plugins and components that can afford you commenting ability in J1.5 - that&#39;s a ton to suss through, so I thought I&#39;d take a look for you and offer a few recommendations:

First up, its a package called JoomlaComment .&nbsp; Its a component-module set which has been around for some time and has not been made native to 1.5... so you might want to check out their forums to see how well it performs in Legacy Mode and whether there are any down-sides when using it with other newer components native to 1.5.

Overall, I like this extensions because its themable, has BBcode, offers thumbs up/down on comments and generally has lots of features.&nbsp; Plus, its free/GPL - worth using if you have time to tinker, change CSS to match your site etc...

As the web becomes more widgetized many people are looking towards externally powered scripts to add functionality to their site.&nbsp; A new commenting widget that&#39;s been getting much love from the blogging world is Disqus.&nbsp; I like the idea of using an external service to provide comments on a site - Disqus is under market pressure to innovate and constantly upgrade the functionality of their product, which means that you should be getting the best comment system out of them for little effort - no more watching out for upgrades and then worrying about maintenance.&nbsp; Of course, there&#39;s also an issue of scalability to consider - if you ever decide to move away from Joomla as a web platform, Disqus comments should allow you to get up and running on the new site with your comments hassle-free.

Thirdly, we have Azrul&#39;s JomComment .&nbsp; This package has been around for some time and since it was first released I&#39;ve loved seeing their company grow - to since release another couple of pretty sound little apps to use on your Joomla site. JomComment cleanly integrates natively in J1.5 with smooth AJAXy effects - eg. when someone posts a comment and instant-approval is set to &#39;on&#39;, the comment posting box will fade out and the comment will replace it - fading into the list of comments under an article immediately with no need to reload a page.

Given that JomComment is J1.5-native, you have piece of mind in knowing that it will play fairly nicely with the new Joomla MVC architecture and let you template your comment interface with simple override files - no need to edit the actual component to make your comments aesthetically jive to your site&#39;s theme.&nbsp; However, that freedom comes at a price - JomComment is commercially available for around $30US.

If you&#39;re cool with relinquishing control of your data and having a 3rd party company handle/store your site&#39;s comments, I highly recommend trying out disqus - though, if you want to keep it all local and are a fan of simple interfaces then my vote&#39;s with JomComment.

I&#39;ve just looked at 1/10 of the options out there - what do you all use?&nbsp; Any other recommendations?

Disclosure: We&#39;re actually using JomComment here on whyjoomla - so you&#39;ll be able to test it simply by posting a comment below.

There has been some debate and a little confusion (and some misinformation) about whether or not extension developers should upgrade their extensions to Joomla 1.6. The short answer is "yes, except if you have an extension that is now ruled obsolete by the new functionality."

I'm pleased to announce that Phil Locke, a recent addition to the OSM Board of Directors, has been appointed Capital Committee Chair today.&#160; 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.&#160; Congratulations Phil, and thank you for leading up on this important effort!

Discuss this post on the Joomla! People site.

The third annual Joomla Day New England is now open for registration! This year's event will be held on April 2, 2011, at the Marlboro College Graduate School in Brattleboro, Vermont. Located conveniently just a mile from Exit 1 on Interstate 91, we're 12 miles from Massachusetts and a river's width from New Hampshire.

It has been a while since my latest post, but I really have been busy working on new website building projects. So my time is already limited, because I do all this stuff on the Internet after my normal daytime job. Why? because I like to share knowledge, get in touch with new idea&#8217;s and try them [...]

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

So you want to know how your Joomla site is on SEO? | Joomla SEO

It has been a while since my latest post, but I really have been busy working on new website building projects. So my time is already limited, because I do all this stuff on the Internet after my normal daytime job. Why? because I like to share knowledge, get in touch with new idea’s and try them [...]

Post from: Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com

Over the last couple of years, we have been conducting a survey about the scope and features of the Joomla community. Over 7,000 people have completed the our survey over the last few years, and this year we want to make it the biggest ever.

Complete our survey and you'll be entered to win prizes!

• Grand prize winner: Our new lifetime Developer club - $399 value
• First Prize: Three $100 gift certificates to Amazon.com
• Second Prize: Three Joomlashack University spots
• Third Prize: Five template giveaways
• Bonus prize: 3,000 person to take the survey, also a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate

Head to our survey now and tell us about how you use Joomla!

Captain's log, September the 13th 2010.

Dear Community,

It's been almost three months since I took over the role of Trademark team leader. Three very, very busy months are behind TM team and I feel it's time to give you a report of what's been going on. I know that a lot of people tend to observe TM team and it's activities as a bunch of dark hooded guys up in the High tower doing the dark arts. Well, we're not. And I plan to put a stop to this public image by making TM team more open to the community.

So, what's been going on lately?

Our first major task was to clean the backlog of all the domains that waited approval. Believe me, it wasn't an easy task. Thanks to extreme efforts of Claire Mandville we managed to bring that list to it's minimum. I've been contacted by people thanking me and telling me that they completely forgot that they even submitted their domains for approval cause over a year passed since they did so. One of our goals is that such things never happen again.

TM team got reorganized internally. What does this mean? Well, my main idea was to make us all obsolete. Me, as a team leader, the first. TM team, and any team as a matter of fact, is about the whole team not individuals. If you tend to organize your team around one or two individuals what happens when one of your individuals leaves - everything falls apart. And we don't want that. The decission is made to spread the work between sub-teams of the main team and so two new "virutal" roles were created - The Domain Keeper and Logo Keeper. In our case those two roles were taken by Claire Mandville and Dianne Henning. Each of the sub-teams takes care of education of new members too.

This brings us to the next point - documentation. Since we're not dealing with the dark arts and the secret knowledge we decided to document every procedure we're dealing with on a daily basis. In community projects team members come and go. And that is normal. The problem shows its ugly face when we realize that no one really knows how are the things done. To prevent that we decided to document everything we do.

Documentation itself is not enough if you don't have a record of real people doing the job on a daily basis. In my personal opinion there is no better way to do that than via mailing list. Thus, TM team finally got it's internal mailing list so that everything we do gets archived. Such an archive is of great help to newcomers - I should know. When I came to OSM the mailing list archive helped me understand what is going on.

One of our big concerns are TM violations around the world. People using Joomla! TM without an approval or people who got an approval in the past but got lost somewhere down the road. Working with violations is somehow my personal trade - back in Free Software Foundation Europe(FSFE) I used to work on GPL violations around the world. That's why apart from working with the team on organizing things most of my time goes on checking the violations that get reported one way or the other.

How many people do you know who get lost in the procedure of submitting their domain to OSM? A lot. I've noticed that quite some people make a distinction between OSM and Joomla! and they don't quite understand why do they need an approval of Joomla! related web sites by some OSM group. In order to try and fix that we came up with an idea to move most of TM related data from OSM web site to Joomla! website. This is currently in process of planning along with reorganizing TM material so that non-legal people can easily understand what are they allowed to do and what is a violation of Joomla!'s trademark.

Three months later...

A lot has been done in just three months. I'd like to thank the whole TM team on their time and dedication. Time to move forward. Plans are set into motion and there is no going back. In order to make it all a reality we need your help - help from the community. When I started my TM work the idea of bringing TM team closer to the community was my guiding star. But how to do it? Simple. Bring the community closer to TM team.

Back in FSFE we have local teams in many countries. This helps us be closer to local communities and above all, it helps us speak their languages. I find this extremely important. Languages are a personal hobby of mine and I know the power they hold. That's why I'd like to have more people from different Translation teams in TM team. Joomla! speaks so many languages I can't even start to count them all. And that is a power beyond all powers. That is something that can make TM team extremely efficient. Something that can bring knowledge of trademark to every single Joomla! user out there.

So, this is a call to all Translation teams out there - if you are interested in helping TM team, please, reach me or any other TM team member and let's start working together.

Awaiting your responses at: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/686-From+the+trenches+of+Trademark+team+dicussion.html?groupid=579

Greetings from the trenches of Trademark team,
Marko Milenovic

We are excited that the Packt Publishing Best Joomla! Theme award includes our own Joomla template Inspirion.

This Award features five finalist Joomla! themes and extensions that have been selected by the Joomla! project representatives.

We'd like to thank everyone who participated in the experimental Joomla Roadmap Meeting that was held last Friday live in NYC and virtually via live streaming on Ustream and twitter. This meeting was looking at the next major revision of Joomla after the long-term support release 2.5 comes out in a few months.

Joomla with its standard well thought out structure will give you a perfect platform to get your keyword clusters together and boost your website into the search engine ranking of your main keyword, just read here on how to set things right...

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

How to Optimize your Joomla site with Keywords | Optimize Joomla Keywords

Joomla is one of the most powerful open source content management systems on the planet. Its different versions have been downloaded millions of times and its used on millions of websites. Joomla 1.5 had many improvements over 1.0, but now, with the release of the new version 1.6, several important features have been added like ACL, infinite categories, automatic updates, a new highly usable wordpress-like backend and improved SEO. These features mean that Joomla is now on a level playing field with other CMS's like Drupal and Wordpress.

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