How to backup your Joomla or Wordpress Installation and have the backup emailed to your Gmail account

If you want to take control over your own backups but are scared that you are going to forget to run them regularly, here is a method to make a backup of your website and have the backup emailed to your Gmail account.

Let's take a look at the advantages of doing this.

1. You are not dependent on having your hosting provider make backups for you. Yes, WE make backups on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, but frankly, you might be hosting with a place whose backups are patchy or non-existent, and our backups sometimes also fail due to server load or other snafu's. In this way, you know that you always have your own backups available to you.
2. The method that I am going to show you entails that the backups run automatically without you having to remember to a thing!
3. This method of doing backups will not use your ISP bandwidth, but rather your server bandwidth. Please note therefore that if you use this, you should make sure that this will fit into your server bandwidth allocation (this could be a problem if you are hosting on a South African server!)

Click on the read more link to get the full tutorial!

We are running our next Joomla training course on 27 May 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 27 May 2010.

* Update on 7 April 2010 to update the date of the course

* Update on 8 May 2010 to update the date of the course

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

 
 
 
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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.