We are running our next Joomla training course on 20 February 2010 in Johannesburg. The course is a hands-on course for newbies to Joomla and use a case study to go through the whole process of creating a website in Joomla, from understanding how to structure content, to manipulating and loading images, to installing components and plugins, to making your site SEO friendly.

The course is hands-on and intensive for the whole day, and at the end of the day you will be fully equipped to build your own Joomla website. The course comes with a full support manual, a CD with the most useful plugins and components, and free Joomla templates

Click here to read more about our Joomla Training Course on 20 February 2010.

So you have wanted to upgrade your joomla 1.0 site to joomla 1.5 but scared to make the jump in case you lose your current content? Well you no longer need to worry about that any more as in this tutorial we can show you how to migrate your Joomla 1.0 content to Joomla 1.5.

Click on the read more link below to get to the meat of the matter.

Everybody knows that it is much easier to develop a website on a local server first before uploading it to the actual web server. The turnaround time for testing and fixing is just that much quicker using a local server.

Typically one would not really set up an actual Linux server to work on, although that is certainly possible and lots of companies do exactly that, but we prefer to make use of what is commonly known as a WAMP server - a portable, standalone application that combines Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl. A WAMP server therefore is like running a fully fledged Apache server on your Microsoft Windows PC.

The biggest problem with Joomla! is that it really is not very search engine friendly. The out-of-the-box URLs are horrible squiggles not readable by any search engine let alone humans (well, I exaggerate, Google does not have any problems indexing these pages, but if you do a search for any popular search term you will see that those particular types of pages do not tend to be at the top of the serach results)

But more important than the URLs, is the way that Joomla displays the Title tag - this is by far the most important piece of text on your whole page, and Joomla displays the site name in the title, THEN followed by the name of the particular content item or page being displayed at that point. Even worse, the default setting for the title is that of the MENU name. How awful is that!

I was really shocked recently to discover that the developer of OpenSEF has abandonded the project and even more, apparently has decided to move away from Joomla! I am not 100% clear on his reasons, not having followed the whole saga but I do think that it is unfortunate, especially since he deleted the whole support forum from his website as well.

What a pity to lose all that knowledge. There are 13900 pages sitting in the Google cache...
I am using OpenSEF on all my sites but will also explore Artio JoomSEF in future.

Apparently OpenSEF has now been taken over by another developer as is now known as NUSEF - so at least it hasn't completely disappeared from the horison.

More information can be found on NUSEF here

 
 
 
body.contentpane {
 
background: #FFFFFF;
 
padding-left : 2px;
 
}
 

I attended the first Joomla! Day in South Africa over the weekend in Cape Town, organised by SlingShot and http://www.joomla.org.za.

It was great!

Here are some photos that I stole from

http://picasaweb.google.com/slingshotsean/JoomlaDaySouthAfricaCapeTown

I hope Sean from Slingshot doesn't mind.

Apart from Melanie who helped organise the event (in the back) I am the single female in the photo - and one of about 4 who attended the event! Where are all the lady geeks?

But how great is this - I met the JoomlaJunkies guys as well as Ryan, the author of the JCE Wysiwig Editor

as well as, of course, lots of other people doing great Joomla! stuff.

The next Joomla!Day will be in Johannesburg, so for a change I won't have to get up at the ung-dly hour of 3:45am to catch a flight....

Since I wrote my previous article on using PHP in Joomla content I have had a few more enquiries on how to use it. Apart from that, the original mambot (kl_php) is not available any more on the Joomla extensions site. I know that there is a new one available (run_php) but I have to admit that I haven't tried it yet. Well, you know, kl_php works great for me, so if it ain't broke - don't fix it!

Here is the download link to the original mabot - kl_php.zip

Please note the following: kl_php can only really be used in content, not in modules. In order to evaluate PHP code in modules, you need to download and install the following module : mod_kl_evalphp.zip

Copy the module and rename the title for each new instance of a module that you would like to have with embedded PHP code.

In the past couple of months I have started to install JCE editor as a standard on all my Joomla websites. In my opinion this is the best free WYSIWYG editor available for Joomla at the moment.

Of course, if you have another editor that you would like to punt - feel free to bring it under my attention.

I also haven't tried any commercial editors yet, so I cannot really say how they compare.

But for a free editor, JCE Editor is great value for money!

So what makes it so great?

The editor itself comes packed with all the standard features that you would expect from a good WYSIWYG editor: Redo and Undo buttons, bullets, numbering,  indent, outdent, cut, copy, paste, align right, left and justified and table formatting.

And then the little extras: A paste button to paste from MsWord. For you that have ever pasted text directly from Word you will know that you get the most horrific formatting thrown in as a little present from Mr Gates. With this nifty button, it pastes clean HTML but retain your style formatting (e.g. Heading 1 becomes an <h1> tag) if you had any. Wonderful!

A paste button to paste plain text, without formatting. Again, if you are pasting from somewhere where you might unwittingly carry formatting along that you might not want, this button will save the day.

But the creme de la creme are the available plugins (please note, some of these plugins are not free and requires a subscirption):

Firstly, the image manager. The image manager was the reason why I originally decided to use the editor and I have to admit shamefacedly that I do not actually use { mosimage } any more. The image editor allows you to upload an image on the fly from your local drive AND resize and optimize it while you are doing it. You have control over where to place your image. You can also create a thumbnail on the fly of your image.

Secondly, there is an advanced linking manager available. If you have ever tried to link to an internal article you will what a pain it is. The link manager brings up your articles as well as a search box to search for articles. You can link directly to any of your articles through this facility.

Frankly, there are a couple of other utilities available as well (such as the ability to have a Lightbox type popup for your images) that I haven't even tried yet.

Support for this editor is very active (and in fact, the author is a fellow South African - Ryan from www.joomlacontenteditor.net - thanks Ryan!).

How do you get use the editor?

Some basic steps:

Step 1: Download the latest version of the JCE Component here:

Download the JCE Editor Component for Joomla 1.5

and the plugin here:
Download the JCE Editor Plugin for Joomla 1.5

and install both the Component and the Plugin. This installation of the editor also automatically installs the plugins for the Image manager and the Advanced Link manager.

Remember to publish the plugin!

Remember to make JCE Editor your default editor!