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A Powerful New SEO Joomla Template from Joomlashack


JS eBusiness Joomla templateWe are really excited to release our latest template from Joomlashack - eBusiness.

We have been blogging about some of the underlying features of this new template at Joomlashack, its powerful and flexible 960 grid framework and its super fast loading times.

If you need a rock solid SEO platform for your Joomla website, ou need the latest Joomla template from Joomlashack - JS eBusiness

JS eBusiness is a web 2.0 template with lots of white space, bold fonts and raw SEO power, JS eBusiness makes a perfect template for business and organizations launching themselves into the web 2.0 world.

Check out the eBusiness Features

A question for the Joomla community - Why Joomla?


whyjoomla_sm_logoI've been posting sporadically to this blog for some time now, and we've been lucky to attract a few thousand people per month.  I generally advocate that a site's success doesn't solely reside in Google Analytics but instead, mainly in the feel of community participation it relays to people when they spend time on it.   In that respect, things are going well here - you guys post comments here and there fairly regularly and old threads are always being picked up for debate.

When I launched the pamiętnik internetowy I sought to answer its title question through the anecdotes and ponderings I was going to post to it.  Though, in the past few months - with Joomla 1.5 being released and a whole stack of new extensions being released for it, I'm still curious to hear why you - the Joomla community at large, choose to use it as your platform of choice for building websites.

So - please feel free to be as candid as you'd like, post a comment below to answer the simple question...

... Why Joomla ? 

Add commenting to your site - 3 extensions to compare


For a long time I've wondered why commenting on articles hasn't been a stock feature in Joomla.  For the most part, I think probably 90% of websites today use the function as an essential way to allow publishers to communicate with their audience and gain valuable feedback from them.

Joomla's Extensions directory lists over 30 plugins and components that can afford you commenting ability in J1.5 - that's a ton to suss through, so I thought I'd take a look for you and offer a few recommendations:

picture_1First up, its a package called JoomlaComment .  Its a component-module set which has been around for some time and has not been made native to 1.5... so you might want to check out their forums to see how well it performs in Legacy Mode and whether there are any down-sides when using it with other newer components native to 1.5.

Overall, I like this extensions because its themable, has BBcode, offers thumbs up/down on comments and generally has lots of features.  Plus, its free/GPL - worth using if you have time to tinker, change CSS to match your site etc...

picture_2As the web becomes more widgetized many people are looking towards externally powered scripts to add functionality to their site.  A new commenting widget that's been getting much love from the blogging world is Disqus.  I like the pomysł of using an external service to provide comments on a site - Disqus is under market pressure to innovate and constantly upgrade the functionality of their product, which means that you should be getting the best comment system out of them for little effort - no more watching out for upgrades and then worrying about maintenance.  Of course, there's also an issue of scalability to consider - if you ever decide to move away from Joomla as a web platform, Disqus comments should allow you to get up and running on the new site with your comments hassle-free.

picture_3Thirdly, we have Azrul's JomComment .  This package has been around for some time and since it was first released I've loved seeing their company grow - to since release another couple of pretty sound little apps to use on your Joomla site. JomComment cleanly integrates natively in J1.5 with smooth AJAXy effects - eg. when someone posts a comment and instant-approval is set to 'on', the comment posting box will fade out and the comment will replace it - fading into the list of comments under an article immediately with no need to reload a page.

Given that JomComment is J1.5-native, you have piece of mind in knowing that it will play fairly nicely with the new Joomla MVC architecture and let you template your comment interface with simple override files - no need to edit the actual component to make your comments aesthetically jive to your site's theme.  However, that freedom comes at a price - JomComment is commercially available for around $30US.

If you're cool with relinquishing control of your termin and having a 3rd biba company handle/store your site's comments, I highly recommend trying out disqus - though, if you want to keep it all local and are a fan of simple interfaces then my vote's with JomComment.

I've just looked at 1/10 of the options out there - what do you all use?  Any other recommendations?

Disclosure: We're actually using JomComment here on whyjoomla - so you'll be able to ankieta it simply by posting a comment below.

Adding social publikatory to your Joomla site


In a recent workshop at the Marlboro College Graduate School, a student complained that she was unable to figure out how to post her Facebook "fan box" on her Joomla site.

Adding Tweetmeme to your Joomla site


There are so many reasons to making your site easily visible on Social Networking websites and platforms - they raise general visibility and offer access to communities which may not otherwise find the information you spend time publishing in your posts.

Of course, one of the most agile word-of-mouth Social platforms on the web is Twitter and you may have recently noticed a pretty cool widgety thing people are using on their blogs/sites to include a 'retweet' łącze and counter of how many times a post has been tweeted - its powered by a site called 'Tweetmeme' and installs pretty easily on any website - whether using static html or a CMS like Joomla.

When you take a peek at the tweetmeme page containing the necessary embed code it may not be too easy to tell how to use it with your Joomla site - and though there's a couple of plugins/extension floating around Joomla, it may not offer the flexibility you require for clean theming/templating.  However, there's an easy way to go about embedding this and all it takes is a small modification of the de facto embed code. 

All you have to do is:

  • copy the following code(s),
  • replace 'http://mysite.com' with your own root URL and:
  • replace 'twitterhandle' with your twitter handle (if you want reweets to automagically incude @yourtwitterhandle - you can opt to delete that line from the code otherwise.

For individual article template files (eg 'templates > your_template  > html > com_content > article > default.php'):

  <script type="text/javascript">  tweetmeme_style = 'compact';  tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php odgłos $this->article->readmore_link; ?>';  tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';  </script>

For article list pages - like section or category template files (eg 'templates > your_template  > html > com_content > category > blog_item.php'):

  <script type="text/javascript">  tweetmeme_style = 'compact';  tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php pogłos $this->item->readmore_link; ?>';  tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';  </script>

The trick then is to take this code and include it in the appropriate version of your theme's template files - Of course, you can see I've wrapped the code in a div called 'tweetmeme' so you can then add in some css for that div wherever you want in your template to style the tweetmeme widget.  You can learn more about Joomla templates and the files which they can comprise of in the official documentation wiki.

Basically what we've done here is include some php to tell the embed code the specific URL for each post - so the widget works cleanly on individual article pages as well as displays showing multiple articles at once.

*You can see the widget in action here on this site above - just below the title of each post. Try it out and retweet this post to see how it works!

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