PHP-CSS-DIV-CMS Joomla-Java Info

Can you help me test email marketing services

08.08.09

There are lots of email marketing services: iContact, Mailchimp, Aweber etc etc.

But I don't think there has been a scientific test and review of how well they deliver, all of them give their deliverability rates, but how can we compare them?

I need your help to do this very test and compare these services, here's how...

The test is a simple one, gather a test group of volunteers (that's you) and then get a subscription to each service. We'll then send out an identic[...]

Joomla 1.6 and 1.7 introduced some new features regarding search, which may be helpful to you when building websites.

SEOMoz just posted a great list of 14 best practices for modern SEO that they are using with their consulting clients. Some real interesting tips, like the lack of importance of H1 tags and  meta keywords.

Keep reading for review of the 14, with some notes about possible Joomla implications.

You can read more about these at SEOMoz: SEO Best Practices

Title Tag Format

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keywords | Brand
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword [...]

If you didn't know, I am a great fan of iContact.

I think that every website should be engaged in email marketing, and I think 3rd party systems are better than Joomla extensions.

But there is one feature that's missing, the ability to create a segment of anyone that's ever opened or clicked on one of your emails.

Being able to segment your email lists is real really important. Companies such as Amazon excel at this and their ROI on email shows it.

How does iConta [...]

The Production Leadership Team (PLT) is the group of people that is responsible for keeping the machinery that produces the Joomla software maintained and in good working order.  The PLT aims to meet in person once or twice a year.  The last development related summit was held in Australia in January of 2009 and this meeting was pivotal for bringing in necessary changes to the organisational and communication structure of the Joomla production system, lowering the barriers to entry for contribution significantly.

The next PLT Summit will be held around the Joomla Day West in San Jose in October this year.  Prime focus will be given to establishing the policy and process we need to revise in order to make Joomla 1.7, and all future versions, happen in a more timely and efficient manner, and allow for innovation to be incorporated at a pace that keeps up with the dynamic flow of the part of the internet in which we reside. To help us plan for this summit, we'd like your suggestions for what you think might be important for us to talk about.  We only have two or three days together so we can't cover everything, but we'd like to know what's on your mind all the same whether you are a user, a developer, a designer or a site administrator.  If you have a suggestion, please post them using this form.

Finally, we must thanks the sponsors for this event which have offset the major costs that would otherwise have been bourn by PLT members personally.  Thanks go to eBay, Microsoft and Kontent Design for allowing us to make this event possible.

I was surprised to see how much searching it took to find this solution and so thought it worthy of a blog post...

... When installing a fresh copy of Joomla 1.5 you may notice that it comes with a configuration.php-dist file; my assumption upon seeing this was that I should rename it 'configuration.php' and chmod it 777 so that the installer could write the values I fill in during installation to the file.

Well, don't worry about the configuration.php file until the end of the install walkthrough screens; you're likely to get an error when trying to install sample data using a pre-defined configuration.php file - instead, wait until the last install screen where a congratulations message is displayed, then copy the code it provides into an empty file called configuration.php and upload it to root.

More info @ the forums...

Looking at the latest Release Candidate of Joomla, version 1.5 RC3 you will find some Differences as it comes to the SEO functions. First off, the difference in Options in RC2 The SEO Settings in Joomla RC3 So what are the results of this settings: With the Suffix Active As you might notice, the last new option attach’s a .html [...]

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

In my previous post I mentioned the fact that the Read More option of Joomla was not editable anymore. Before that I wrote about how-to-solve-the-joomla-read-more-problem in version 1.0.x But I found an item in RC3 in the Advanced Parameters of the article section that makes in possible to do an “Click here to read text per article.. It is [...]

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

Joomlashack has two great Joomla template releases, Cascada and Nuvo. Both are packed with the usual Joomlashack SEO features, dynamic 3 column layouts and come in multiple colors. Cascada is a cool & refreshing Joomla 1.5 template and is packed with enough features to satisfy Joomla novices and power-users alike! Nuvo is ultra-modern, sleek, powerful and designed to give you maximum control over the appearance of your site (without ever having to touch a line of HTML or CSS code), Nuvo puts you in the driver's seat!

For the first part of the 2012 budget process, the CLT has come up with the following goals.

Goal #1: Final Rollout of the New Site Templates

Task: Rollout each new site template as they are ready

Task: Open up a channel where people can provide feedback and report any usage issues

Task: Respond to reported issues

Target Date for Completion: As they are ready, between now and February 2012

Resources required: Volunteer time.

Goal #2: Assess the amount of data channels currently in use and try to condense where possible

Task: Have a team of individuals from the CLT perform an analysis of the current community channels and see where some merging of resources and content can be done.

Task: Combine research into a document to share with the CLT and request community feedback as well.

Target Date for completion: February 2012

Resources required: Volunteer time.

Goal #3: Rollout Paid features for JRD/JED Directories.

Task: Implement payment system

Task: Define rules and guidelines, terms and conditions

Task: Testing period before launch

Target Date for completion: January 2012 for task #1 and #3. As soon as requested legal guidance is provided for Task #2

Resources Required: Legal guidance and documentation, which needs to be provided through OSM. This has been requested, currently waiting for that information.

Goal #4: Template Directory (JTD) Launch

Task: Launch a working version of the Template Directory

Task: Recruit a team of editors and put it to work

Resources Required:

 

• Legal guidance and documentation to determine that the Terms of Use for the site are aligned with our ™
• Possible Travel for team members to meet face to face
• Volunteer time is also required.

 

Target Date for completion: February 2012

We'd like to thank all of the volunteers on the various CWG teams who have helped to make the above goals possible for 2012. The Joomla community is lucky to have so many hard working people making these exciting things happen!

We invite the community to provide feedback here in the CWG group of the Joomla People site: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1371-2012-proposed-clt-goals.html?groupid=398

Joomla security - one of the most frequent topics of conversation among Joomie's (usability is a close second) - is a complex area and the technicalities of it quickly get ahead of most Joomla users. Often, it's a conversation about the reputation Joomla has about security that starts "Is Joomla secure?" People are often concerned about the seeming high number of hacked Joomla sites, and people defending Joomla pointing at the need to update 3rd party extensions or use good hosts. There are many specific things you can do to make your site secure. They range from the obvious to making sure folder permissions are correct on the server, to esoteric like changing the jos_ MySQL table prefix that Joomla uses. For 99% of sites, security boils down to: 1. Use a good host, that means paying more than $10 a month. 2. Backup lots. Be like Nike... Just DO it 3. Patch often. Joomla and all your extensions.

In an effort to mitigate the recent JED downtime (over the last few days) we've just completed a migration of this site to a new server. The new server has faster hard drives, as well as a higher performance processor (Quad Core).

We realize how important the JED is to the community, and have worked as hard and as fast as we could to identify and take action addressing the causes. In addition to the hardware upgrade, we also discovered what appeared to be a DDOS attack that was also contributing to the issues. Many of the IP's identified and blocked were most likely ordinary computers, their owners unaware they were being used to this end.

 

In any case, thanks for your patience, and for now we hope things will return back to normal. Special thanks to Ben and Chris from Rochen who have both worked around the clock, staying up late to sort some of these things out.

 

Recently the Joomla Community Workgroup came up with an idea to share just how much work is being done with the wider community by way of a monthly team report. You can see the source of the combined report I have compiled below here.

It's an incredible snapshot of the 100's of volunteers working on this part of the Joomla Project. Thanks must also to go to the support OSM ( www.opensourcematters.org ) gives to our project, as well as the Joomla Production Workgroup.

Read on for the full report, it's amazing!

I've advocated the benefits of keeping control of one's own data for some time - with the proliferance of 3rd party/hosted services on the web in the past few years though, I've had to rethink why it is important to not use them to host content or parts of your website.

One of the coolest innovations I've seen in the past couple of years on the web, which has me favouring hosted solutions rather than local ones, are 3rd party comment system providers.  Its now possible to have a service like Disqus or IntenseDebate power the entire commenting function for a site via a javascript call to their service!

This is really groovy for many reasons - including:

• Not having to worry about upgrading the version of your Joomla-local commenting extension,
• You can optionally include commenting wherever you want on your site,
• Because its the business of these service providers to make their system as kick-ass as possible, you know that you'll get all the newest features/functionality when it comes out,
• They're free.

Recently, the good folks @ Rockettheme released a great extension which brings the simple power of using either Disqus or IntenseDebate (which is owned by Automatik - the Wordpress people) to Joomla and I recommend installing it on your Joomla site today.

We were about to switch over to using Rokcomment with IntenseDebate here on whyjoomla.com this week (as we've already done @ plantseedling.com) but are holding out to see what a new version of iJoomlacomment will look like when akismet is working properly and recaptcha has been implemented...

Honestly, if you're rolling out a new site which doesn't have old comments then its a no-brainer; grab Rokcomment and breathe easy knowing that you'll likely never have to login to your site to delete spammy comments and that your site users will find it a breeze to post their thoughts on your articles.

Not so long ago a previous update was released for Joomla 1.5; I mentioned that updating your 1.5 site was pretty easy and well, its time to do it again.  Joomla 1.5.7 was announced as a security update some days back and I thought I'd mention it in case you hadn't heard the news... 

Note: its great to see how quickly reported issues with Joomla are being solved by the core team and everyone contributing to the project!  With each release comes fixes as well as improvements to Joomla - expect an updated OpenID library, upgraded TinyMCE, better menu handling and more with Jooma 1.5.8

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!

Source