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Archive for July, 2008

Speaking at SEMforSMB

24 July 2008

Last week I spoke at the SEMforSMB conference in Austin, Texas. The conference was primarily focussed on search engine optimization and marketing for small and mid size businesses.

I did two talks, one about ‘Building a business website in 3 minutes‘. I showed how easy it is to setup a Joomla! 1.5 site, install a template and a component. All in I think it even took less then three minutes.

SEMforSMB US 2008 – Building a website in 3 minutes

The second presentation was about how to search engine optimize your Joomla! 1.5 site. I co-presented this session together with Jay Moreno from redflamemedia. Jay specialises in Joomla! SEO and it was great to have an expert like him at my side to answers all the though questions.

While talking with people we learned that there still exist a lot of misconceptions about the fact that Joomla! has insufficent SEO features. At the conference I talked with many experts on issues like duplicate content, SEF URL’s etc. All of them agreed that Joomla! 1.5 is a very SEO friendly CMS.

Don’t believe me ? Well, let’s take the Nooku.org site as an example. Nooku.org is getting a SEO score of 97% at domaintools.com and a an nice 84% on websitegrader.com Nooku.org isn’t using any SEF or SEO plugins. Just a plain Joomla! 1.5 installation with Nooku installed. That’s it.

For those of you interested in reading up on our SEO talk, here are the slides :

SEMforSMB US 2008 – SEO for Joomla! 1.5

Joomla.org: the lost sites

20 July 2008

In recent months, the offical joomla.org site has undergone some major changes. Unfortunately, two extremely valuable resources have disappeared, and there aren’t many signs that they’re coming back in some way.

news.joomla.org

The new community.joomla.org was opened a little while ago, as a resource where all contributors of the Joomla project (documentors, moderators, developers, …) have a blog to share information. That’s a great initiative, but unfortunately the old news.joomla.org had to make way (it’s available, but there are no links to it and it hasn’t been updated for two months). This site was a place where anybody could post Joomla! related news. I always felt this was a great way of keeping an eye on what’s going on in the community. Joomla!  is not only about the people who contribute directly to the project itself, but also about everybody else, be it (commercial or other) extension developers, template developers, professional integrators, book or tutorial authors, users, … Certainly a place can be provided at community.joomla.org where everybody can post, making it a true community resource.

dev.joomla.org

More importantly, the old dev.joomla.org was replaced by docs.joomla.org and developer.joomla.org. Unfortunately a lot of valuable information is gone:

  • The developer wiki is still available, but it is no longer reachable if you don’t have the link. It contains a lot of documentation for developers, including some of my own contributions which I’d hate to get lost. Only a very small part has moved to docs.joomla.org, and is hard to find there.
  • The old developer blogs were very actively posted on during the development of Joomla! 1.5. Whenever something new was introduced in the framework, it was posted there, along with how to use it and why it was the way it was. These old blog posts are no longer reachable.

Update

I removed the poll. The result was 90 votes in favor of bringing the sites back versus 9 votes against.

In the meantime, JoomlaConnect was released as a replacement for news.joomla.org. A lot of confusion could have been avoided by communicating about this in the open early on. The issues with the developer documentation is still unresolved as far as I’m aware.

Translating our blog posts

14 July 2008

It’s been eight months since Johan posted the very first entry on the blog, and this one is already number 65. We noticed that every now and then, someone mentions one of our posts, reuses information, or translates an item for a local community site. Of course, we love that! To further encourage this, we decided to relicense all our posts under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (unless stated otherwise).

What does it mean? This license gives you a couple of freedoms:

  • You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work
  • You are free to remix or adapt the work (this includes translating it)

There are of course a couple of conditions, to make sure everybody plays fair:

  • You must attribute the work to us, by adding ‘Originally written by [AUTHOR] at [LINK TO ORIGINAL POST]
  • You can’t use our work for commercial purposes
  • Whatever you do, your resulting must be licensed under the same license

You can read the full license or the short version at the Creative Commons site.

If you adapt, reuse or translate one of our posts, we’d love to hear about it! Just post a link in the comments of the original post. Not only will this help us to know what’s happening with our posts, it will also point people who are interested to your site. I’ve collected some links below:

German:

Italian:

Dutch:

Hungarian:

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