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Why We Always Give Refunds

Friday, 06 August 2010

This might be the most expensive blog post I"ve ever written, but here goes ... This week I was talking to a developer who sells open source products and their attitude was that they fight even... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

 

 

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Joomla Usability Project Starts to Roll

Tuesday, 27 July 2010

A few weeks back I made a deliberately provocative post entitled "Even Wordpress Usability Sucks" and ended with the suggestion that Joomla form a Usability team. It looks like one is starting to roll.

Congrats to Kyle from Joomlapraise, Chris from JoomlaJunkie and the others in the Joomla UX group on people.joomla.org for getting this started. Here"s how you can help:

1) Join the people.joomla.org group and get involved.

2) Reply to Kyle"s post today with an initial set of areas to work on.

3) Check out Marco Barbosa"s Minima template. He"s been working in this area for several months now and trying to imagine what the Joomla 1.7 admin area might look like. You can test his prototype at: http://marcobarbosa.com/minima/administrator/ Login with demo / demo. Leave feedback here.

 

 

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Show Different Content to Different Joomla Users

Thursday, 22 July 2010

Yesterday I showed how to Hide Columns When Editing the Front End of Joomla as it often causes overlap issues that make editing difficult. In this post I"ll show a quick and easy way to show different content to different users.

Being able to show different content to registered and logged in visitors is a very common request for a Joomla site. By default, you can have Joomla show the "intro" copy to guests and they must to log in to see the rest. But what if you want to show some specific content to guest visitors, and then different content to registered users once they have logged in.

There are a couple of extensions that give this functionality, but as a rule of thumb, I"ll always trying and use the core if I can to get what I want. In this case, I figured out a simple method that worked for my needs.

 

 

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Hide Columns When Editing the Front End of Joomla

Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Editing articles from the front end of a Joomla website is one of its most useful features. Sometimes, however, if you have both a left and right column, when you try to edit, the editor screen/panel will overlap the right columns and make it difficult to read.

There is a simple trick to you do to hide columns, by adding a conditional statement to the place in the template index.php where the right column occurs.

 

 

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How Google Uses Joomla Meta Title, Description and Keyword Tags

Monday, 19 July 2010

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.

 

 

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Automatic Notifications of Errors on Your Joomla Site

Tuesday, 13 July 2010

Wonderfully smart readers ... I need to pick your brains.

We"ve been using Pingdom for years to track our sites. I love it. When sites go down it sends out an automatic email, SMS and even a message via an iPhone app.

When our servers go down, we know.

However, that"s not the same thing as saying when our sites go down, we know.

This weekend a site was hit by a session error and that bought the site down. All a visitor could see was a MySQL error and the message "please repair the database". Because the server was still responding, Pingdom thought the site was up and so didn"t tell us about the problem.

Any ideas on how we can get around this? How can we get notified even when our server is active but our site is throwing out errors?

 

 

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We"re Bringing Joomla and Drupal to Boston

Monday, 12 July 2010

We"ve been to over 50 cities in North America from Anchorage in Alaska to Miami in Florida.

There aren"t many places left on the list of place we"d like to teach. There"s Hawaii of course (we very nearly had a client invite us there) and Puerto Rico too.

However, there is one gaping hole in our U.S. coverage ... Boston.

No longer. Next week we"ll be in downtown Boston teaching Joomla and Drupal for 2 days each.

What"s even better is that I"ll be teaching with the wonderful Jen Kramer. If you don"t know who Jen is you will shortly. She"s a mainstay of the Joomla world:

Jen Kramer

Jen is a senior faculty member at the Marlboro College Graduate Center, teaching courses and workshops in web site design and management, including Joomla. She has also previously taught at Champlain College, the Community College of Vermont, and the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. Jen is a Lynda.com author for the titles "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates", "Joomla! Advanced CSS" and more. Her first book, “Joomla! Start to Finish” was published by Wrox Press/Wiley in January 2010.

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Joomla Security in 3 Easy (ish) Steps

Monday, 05 July 2010

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.

 

 

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Your Thoughts on Joomla Security Extensions?

Wednesday, 30 June 2010

One of my Joomla clients has been hacked by a phishing scheme and it has been a major pain to cleanup. Besides being behind a couple versions in their Joomla, there are multiple third party components installed.

I have been looking at a couple of Joomla security products to help in the process and to use to prevent this in the future. I was wondering if any of Steve"s readers had experience with them, could tell us all about their experience with them, and possibly mention any others they would recommend? I have been looking at RS Firewall and SecureLive.

 

 

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Even Wordpress Usability Sucks

Monday, 28 June 2010

Out of all the blog posts I"ve read this year, one has stuck in my mind more than any other: Why [the] open source crowd should stop crowing about Ning’s problems. He takes on Drupal and KickApps for their lack of usability and then moves on to Wordpress.

He"s right. Even Wordpress usability sucks. It"s generally regarded as the best of the Open Source projects in terms of usability, but even it sucks.

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