Read original post at source site... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Alledia/~3/PLkCt_OCZ-A/

Far and wide across this great nation, Joomla! users have been waiting. Waiting for their voice to be heard. Waiting for their vote to count. On October 16th at the footsteps of Washington DC, the wait will be over. We will finally be hearing from the President himself... Mr. Ryan Ozimek, President of Open Source Matters!

For many months now, Read more...

Wordpress for Joomla! Training now available in Joomlashack University

If you want to blog, Wordpress is a great platform. If you want a blog inside a bigger site, then you can certainly use Joomla for it, I do at www.compassdesigns.net. But why not harness the blogging power of Wordpress inside your Joomla site?

Joomlashack just released a very informative, in-depth training lesson in Read more...

Read original post at source site... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Alledia/~3/D-xebq4fxAY/

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 Read more...

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 Read more...

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.

Read original post at source site... http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/hide-columns-when-editing-the-front-end-of-joomla

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.

Read original post at source site... http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/how-google-uses-joomla-meta-title-description-and-keyword-tags

Last week the team behind Joomla's most popular social network-building software, Community Builder, released a new version (1.2.3) which fixes a bunch of bugs, includes a couple of functional updates and makes way for a new generation of the extension suite - starting with '2.0' to be released soon.

The new release supposedly installs to replace the old one you may have on your site, so upgrading should be fairly simple. Also noteworthy; the release is rumored to work on the new Joomla 1.6 beta 5 release as well.

You can read more info over on the Joomlapolis forums.

We'll be popping a copy onto a fresh install of Joomla 1.6 and posting a review video later this week.

Read original post at source site... http://www.whyjoomla.com/blog/social-networking/96-community-builder-upgrade-available

Joomlatools is pleased to announce the immediate release of DOCman's Productivity Pack 1.5.2. This is a maintenance release which looks to fix-up some small issues found within previous releases. The Productivity pack consists of popular Notify, Populate and Thumbs addons for DOCman 1.5.x. Read more...

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 send get 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 as saying when our sites go down, we know.

This weekend a sites was hit by a session error. and Read more...

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 Read more...

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 Read more...

If you’ve ever worked on an existing website, chances are you’ve run into a directory listing like the following:

Copy of index.html
about.html
contact.html
favicon.ico
index.html
index.html.bak
index.html.bak2
index.html.old
pricing.html

It’s also quite possible you are responsible for having created a mess like this. We’re always told to make backups of our files, and so we make them, often right next to the files of a live site. While it’s a good idea to make a backup of your code before Read more...

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.

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.

Read more...

My apologies for the lack of blog posts here over the last few months.

Between the Open Source Matters board and getting a new company off the ground with Open Source Training it's been a hectic year. In the last few weeks I took a working vacation to  Germany for JandBeyond and then back home to England.

I've been blogging but my limited time and energy has gone into Joomla.org rather than here. Still, there are quite Read more...

Want to know how to do something in Joomla?

This summer I am starting a new project - a "Tutorial Request" program. Each week I'll be tackling an issue that trips Joomla users up and writing a detailed tutorial how to solve it.

Read original post at source site... http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/ask-joomla-questions-get-answers

One of the new features in Joomla 1.6 is more choice for the template in the administrator backend. I was able to spend a few minutes with Andrea Tarr of Tarr Consulting (www.tarrconsulting.com), the brains behind this new accessible admin template, and ask her about it.

Joomla! 1.5 was notable for the inclusion of the Beez template. For the first time Joomla was shipping with a solution for creating accessible websites. With 1.6 we will be extending that to the backend with the addition of the accessible Read more...

Comment extensions are a popular feature to add to Joomla websites, they are a lot of choices, all with slightly different features.

In previous posts, I have talked about how all websites can be online communities, but often when people start thinking about comments, they question is "what is the best comment extension for my Joomla website?"

But I rather think that this is missing the Read more...