PHP-CSS-DIV-CMS Joomla-Java Info

Safari Books Online Webcast on Joomla

01.04.10

Join me next week for the 2nd in the series of free Joomla webcasts from Safari Books Online.

Its on Tuesday, April 6, 2010 1:00 pm EST and I'll be looking at how you can take advantage of the more advanced features of Joomla to make a successful website for your organization or business.

10 attendees will get signed copies of the best selling Joomla book - Joomla - A User's Guide. The last webcast filled up quickly, so make sure you register now!

Any web page, including one generated by Joomla can have "meta tags" or "elements" in the header information. The one's that get the most focus are the Title tag, the Description tag and the Keyword tag. This is mainly because it's thought that these have the most influence on Search Engine Ranking (which is not entirely true). There are other tags/elements such as robots or language that provoke less discussion that the title, description or keyword, but are still important. Lets take each Tag in turn and see how they are used in Joomla. Last week, Joomlashack announced the launch of our the new Joomlashack Annual Developer Template Club! Get $100 OFF the cost to join if you sign up before Monday December 24th. There is also a $100 OFF the price of our Lifetime Developer Club membership (templates for life!) AND $100 OFF Joomlashack University Lifetime membership (learning for life)!  

The success of any software release in an Open Source project depends on people getting involved, and Joomla! 1.6 is no exception. As we get closer to a stable Joomla! 1.6 release I wanted to take a moment and go over the timeline to stable and how you can play a part in making it better, faster.

The year 2009 just began and it is really great to see how many people pick-up the idea to organize a Joomla!Day in their region or support a regional conference. With that they contribute to the project and helping others to learn more about the project or the services related to it. As the Joomla 1.0 series will come to an end mid 2009 we will support all Joomla!Days to offer sessions about the migration towards 1.5. The Joomla User Groups are talking about the topics in their regular meetings and during the conferences people are available for 1 to 1 talks. It is great to see the events and JUG calendars are filling up.

Some of you come to us and ask about how to start an event in a region or if it is ok that you present Joomla on a regional conference. Actually both is great and quite easy to start with. The first step should be that you get in touch with the events team and sign up to become what we call an "event organizers". The events mentoring team will guide you through the process and within all the organizers you can find new ideas and help if needed. More detailed information can be found on our wiki page as well as in the events forum.

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Joomla! @ Expos and Conferences

The Thailand Internet Expo 2009 was the first conference in 2009 Joomla attended. On the last weekend members of the Thail community answered questions and presented the latest information about the project to the attendees of the conference. Akarawuth Tamrareang (aka JoomlaCorner) presented Joomla in a seminar that was pretty crowdy. Check out the pictures to see what was going on.

The upcoming weekend Joomla will have a stand at the FOSDEM 2009. The conference is one of the most important Open Source Conferences in Europe and it always gets alot of geeks and interested people together. On the stand may people from the European Community will be available to answer your questions about the project and of course we will make sure that we can also present some of the upcoming features in the Joomla version 1.6.

A small outlook what the various communities around the world will support in the next few month. Most of those events will have either speakers or a stand on which you can meet with Joomla community and team members. For example you can visit the PHP Quebec Conference in March to listen to a speach from Michelle Bisson, or join in at the SXSW in Austin, Texas and talk with Arno Zijlstra about a very interesting project he is going to present during this event. In Europe Joomla will be presented on the Linux Tage Chemnitz. The team on site is looking for volonteers still and if you have a chance to be around it would be great to support them.

Joomla!Days

The season for Joomla!Days started as well. Next weekend you can meet with development coordinators and team members in Melbourne. The latest news about the project development as well as presentations around the migration to 1.5 will give you a great inside of what is going on in the Joomla-sphere.

In March the European community meets in the United Kingdom at the Joomla!Day UK 2009. The first J!Day in Europe for 2009 will be pretty interesting as the development of Joomla 1.6 will move on and the first results of the opening of the development mailing lists can be seen. Also the migration of Joomla 1.0 websites will become more and more important as the EOL will get closer. Many sessions with high profile speakers are already in preparation for this event.

The registration is already open and the agenda for the Joomla!Day Las Vegas is already forming. Many speakers from the development and community teams are offering various presentations and talks about Joomla. Based on the conference concept it is up to you what will be presented and which information you get. So make sure you register to the event and take part on the process to give an initial idea what you like tohear during these days in Las Vegas.

After Europe and USA Joomla comes back to Asia and the first Joomla!Day in India end of April 2009. The regional community is forming their team and event at the moment. If you have suggestions or contributions please join in the discussions and support the event there. The same goes for the Joomla!Day New England that is planed for end of May 2009. Please support your regional organizers with suggestions, feedback and help with the organization. Many more Joomla!Days are already in preparations for 2009 and we are going to keep you informed about their progress here on the site.

 

 

So a few weeks ago, my aging iphone bought the farm, and I started the search for a replacement. I eventually ended up choosing an Android phone - the Fascinate. AT&T had been a continual source of frustration, and the recent move to allow tethering, but to have to give up the unlimited data plan, (a move most considered a bait and switch) had me looking for another carrier. But anyway, back to the Android OS. Just a few minutes of playing with the phone made me realize how really restrictive the iphone universe is. With the Android Fascinate I could change my launcher/home page, use different players, get and install apps from anywhere, and even (if I were brave) root it and start modifying the programs at a lower level in a few minutes. With the iphone, you are locked into the Apple mindset, everything goes through itunes, development is highly regulated, the interface is virtually impossible to customize.

The Joomla! project and Open Source Matters would like to invite the members of our community to take a look at the proposed 2011 budget and then submit your feedback through Monday April 18th.

A long and winding road...

We realize that unveiling our 2011 budget in April of 2011 doesn’t exceed expectations in the timeliness category. Even though this has much taken longer than we wanted, the good news is that some new planning and budgeting processes have been put into place that will enable  more inclusive and collaborative efforts moving forward, as well as enabling improved goal setting and planning among each of the Joomla! project’s leadership teams.

A collaborative effort

One element of these new processes consisted of forming a budget committee from members of the Production Leadership Team (Chris Davenport), the Community Leadership Team (Wendy Robinson and Matt Lipscomb) and the board of Open Source Matters (Phil Locke and Paul Orwig). This committee has been working together over a period of months to integrate each of the leadership team's revenue generating estimates and funding requests into a budget that is intended to help support the goals of each leadership team and continue to strengthen the Joomla! project’s overall financial position.

Goal setting included as part of planning process

Another new aspect of the budget process involved asking members of the Production Leadership Team (PLT), Community Leadership Team (CLT), and Open Source Matters (OSM) to each put some effort into planning their goals and priorities for 2011, as a predecessor to help them focus on what resources (financial and other) would be needed to achieve those goals. This planning effort has the following benefits:

1. Allows our budget to be a more effective tool for supporting the project's planned priorities for the upcoming year.
2. Allows each leadership team to better understand what the other leadership teams are planning to work on, which will improve inter-team collaboration and support.
3. Allows the community to be aware of goals and priorities for the upcoming year, which will improve transparency and openness and enable increased support and volunteer contributions.
4. Will make it easier to bring in more sponsorship contributions, due to prospective sponsors having a better understanding about what initiatives their contributions will be supporting.

Next steps

Once the community feedback period has closed, the following next steps will be taken to complete the formal approval of the 2011 budget:

1. PLT, CLT, and OSM will review community feedback and offer suggestions.
2. The budget committee will potentially revise the budget based on step 1.
3. PLT, CLT, and OSM will review revised budget.
4. OSM will formally review and (if acceptable) approve the budget.
5. 2011 budget will be published, along with PLT, CLT, and OSM goals for 2011.

Please discuss this blog post on the Joomla! People site.

So I have been updating my Joomla book website, I discovered a problem with my RSS. Ironically, I discuss exactly NOT doing what I did in the book, but do as I say, not what I do (or something).I wanted to redesign my home page. Right now its a category blog - an obvious choice for book news - and then fixed content in the category description. I wanted to change because it's difficult to manage the meta description in Joomla in this layout, so I wanted to change it to a uncategorized article, and then load { loadposition } to show news links.

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 [...]

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

Joomla 1.5 RC2 and RC3 The SEO and Other Differences | Joomla 1.5 SEO

Out-of-the-box, Joomla 1.5 has pretty silly error handling pages - for times when a user hits your site to find a page no longer in existence ('404 Not Found') etc...  A simple work-around I've previously posted about is to create a custom error page as static HTML.

Now, if you like to have your error messages presented to site viewers with the same look and feel as your website, a custom page outside of Joomla might be frustrating - everytime you change the layout of your site you'll likely want to edit that page and so on.

There's another approach; some semantic URL extensions can actually redirect those errors to particular content within Joomla.  I recommend using JoomSEF - its a weird extension because of the partially-free (ie. non-GPL) license they've released it under, but you can download and install it for free and then make one edit to its code to remove a footer message created with the free version.

With JoomSEF, you can choose a custom 404 message by typing it directly into a field through the extension's admin side or by choosing a menu item already linking to a message page you've created.  Plus, you can keep track of 404 messages to help streamline your site's navigation!

JoomSEF will make managing your site's error pages easy, and it makes it much easier to navigate your site by URL because you have more control over the format of URL writing rules than with Joomla's stock SEF URLs option!

Roughly every two weeks or so, Barrie and I will be posting a news roundup from Joomla, pointing to the latest news that you shouldn't miss coming out of the Joomla project.

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

SEO is not rocket science for people who create online content. It’s just a matter of knowing what to do, and more importantly, consistently doing it. You know you have to create valuable, reader-focused content, and also: You’ve got to do keyword research. You’ve got to optimize your reader-focused content. You’ve got to build links to your site. That’s basically it. Effectively and consistently do those three tasks, and you’ll achieve higher rankings and more targeted traffic. Thousands of content creators do all three of these fundamental tasks right from Joomla (or Wordpress, or Drupal). And scores of professional web writers use a web-based application to perform SEO for clients for use on any content platform. How? With the Scribe SEO software.



Joomla 1.7 now features a terrific redirect component, which will make preventing 404 page not found errors in your site redesigns and migrations much easier. This component is particularly important now that many are starting to migrate their sites from Joomla 1.5 to 1.7. In order to understand how to configure ACL (access control levels) for your website, you must first understand how ACL fits together. If you haven't sign up yet for the free Safari Books Online Webcast Series - Black Belt Joomla, you have about 4 hours to do it! I am being extra-ordinarily organized and putting up the slides so you can download before the webcast - how good is that! Taking the "Black Belt" theme, here are the moves you need to be ju-jitsu'ing on your website to make it successful.

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