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The New and Improved Joomla DS Feed Syndication Component

09.05.09

If you have read this Blog for a Longer period of time (or have gone through the Sitemap..:-)) you might have read about the DS Syndication Component in my post Overcoming the Joomla RSS Feed Problem Well, there is a new version of this component since August of this year and I must say it [...]

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

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…

In Joomla 1.5, you always knew what version of Joomla you were running at a glance. It was located in the upper right corner of your screen. Unfortunately, in Joomla 1.6, that very handy feature is much less obvious in the default Joomla administrator template. It's down in tiny letters in the footer.

It is with great pleasure and pride that the Joomla Production Leadership Team (PLT) announces the release of Joomla!® 1.6. Our community has been anticipating this milestone for many months. As we celebrate the arrival of the new version, we wish to recognize the many people who have made this day possible.

In October 2009 the new Joomla training course - Joomlashack University opened its door to its first class of 100 students. For the last 4 weeks, these students have been learning how to Joomla with our rich video screencasts and tutorials and asking questions and networking in our forums.

Before launching Shack U, we knew we had a great product to offer. We gave leading Joomla figures a sneak look at the content and, as you can read yourself, they loved it.

As well as teaching insider Joomla tips and tricks to our first students, we have been taking feedback and improving the course. We have streamlined the student path through the learning content and added more courses.

After 4 weeks, we are ready to open our doors again.

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.

I'm pleased to announce that the OSM Board has new leaders filling critical roles in our organization.

During the past few months, I've spearheaded a project inside Open Source Matters (OSM) to delineate clear roles and responsibilities for a few important positions within our organization.  The goal of this project was to enable our team to more effectively match board members' talents with positions that set them up for success and provided clear objectives and responsibilities.  By putting this project into action, Board members are able to clearly understand what is expected of them within each position, as well as measure their success more objectively with metrics developed by them and their fellow teammates.

This project also provides the Board an opportunity to have a written understanding of the scope these positions.  In the professionalizing of our Board, I strongly believe that actually writing down these positions roles and responsibilities are key to us achieving our goals, and keeping our sanity.  I've even gone as far as to tell candidates for Board positions that one of their key goals should be to find ways to make themselves "obsolete", or in other words, ensure that when it's time for them to hand over their leadership position to another colleague, the new leader can focus on innovation rather than needing to rebuild systems from scratch.

Everyone needs to do SEO, its a continual point I make when speaking at Joomla events. Even if you are a local school, parents will first use Google to find information, they won't come directly to your site.

Our second Video Raw Review is on a useful SEO extensions called iJoomla SEO. Its a very useful tool to help you organize and manage you SEO efforts.

I installed iJoomla SEO and put it through it's paces without ever having used it before. Raw look, no reading documentation, just install it and play!

Sitting down in the wake of Joomla! USA West 2010 I've had a bit of a chance to digest what is going on. The event, held at eBay's own campus, was the biggest JoomlaDay's in the USA. However I now come to the realisation that now both Microsoft and eBay share something unique and awesome. What does Microsoft and eBay have in common?

Both have signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement or the JCA. The JCA is the agreement put in place before code is contributed to the project and two of the largest companies in the technology sphere have now signed the JCA. To be honest when you sit down and think about it this is absolutely awesome and a confirmation of what we're doing with the Joomla! project.

I announced that Microsoft signed the JCA back in April and their contribution to the core was support for the cache support Microsoft provide on Windows. This code, now in the Joomla! 1.6 trunk, will hook into the Wincache extension for PHP and provide a speed boost for running Joomla! on Windows. Since then we've kept the Joomla! Web Platform installer project up to the latest version of Joomla! and it is in my mind the easiest way of getting Joomla! up and running on Windows.

Over the weekend we had the announcement that eBay has signed the JCA as well. eBay is the world's largest online marketplace and is internally using Joomla! to build their portal to help enable the organisation to be data driven through analytics. At the JoomlaDay Oliver Ratzesberger, senior director of analytics platform at eBay, demonstrated their platform utilising not only the core Joomla! product but also third party extensions such as social networking platform JomSocial, forum tool Kunena and Mosets Tree.

It is amazing to be in a world where Joomla!, a GPL project, is being contributed to by Microsoft with not only code in the Joomla! core but with members of the company providing support on the forum and are starting to write documentation on our wiki. eBay have only just come into the fold but they've been working on some very exciting stuff that I look forward to seeing in the near future. I am also excited that both Microsoft and now eBay have been supporting Joomla! events with eBay hosting and sponsoring JoomlaDay USA West in addition to Microsoft hosting the upcoming JoomlaDay New York and JoomlaDay Washington, DC events as well as sponsoring JoomlaDay's around the world such as JoomlaDay Bangkok.

At the end of the day it is great that the project that I and many others have been working on for the last half a decade is now being adopted and supported by some of the biggest companies in the world. I think that's just awesome and let's bring on Joomla! 1.6

Right now the hottest online businesses are online membership websites. Whether learning how to create email newsletters or networking for partners, subscription based membership sites are *the* way to generate revenue from your own expertise.

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As part of the Joomla! project's 2012 goal setting and budget planning proposed process, the Open Source Matters board of directors (OSM) has come up with some ideas for possible top OSM 2012 goals and priorities. Those ideas are listed below.

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.

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.

Microsoft has signed the JCA (Joomla! Contributor Agreement), and we've got some of their code in the Joomla! 1.6 trunk. There, I said it. It feels like it should be so much more doesn't it? Don't worry, I won't end the blog post there.

There's a really simple new approach to defining what a site's default homepage is now with Joomla 1.5: All you have to do is go to Menus>mainmenuand, select the menu item you'd like to be the homepage and hit the new 'Default' button - you'll see a star appear in the table row for that item.  Now, whenever people land at your site they'll see that page/view/component!

Its amazing to look back on some of the most 'recent' posts here on WhyJoomla and see that they were infrequent and published so very long ago. 

There are many reasons for my neglect of this blog - mainly these are related to our not having worked with Joomla much at Design Guru studio (my web design/development firm) lately, but also because every time I would look at the site these past months I would shudder at the thought of cleaning out all of the spammy comments which had accumulated in the Compojoom commenting plugin were using.

Well, client work or not, I've decided to tap myself into the Joomla community again and fire up this blog - unfortunately this means that I had to do away with the old commenting system and delete hundreds of valid comments in the process to shift over to using Disqus (thanks to JoomlaWorks' plugin), but I think it will make for a more enjoyable blogging, and reading, experience for us from now on.

Its good to be back - expect regular posts at least weekly from me!

- Qasim Virjee

 

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