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Basic Joomla 1.6 SEO Settings Do’s and Don’ts

You are reading Basic Joomla 1.6 SEO Settings Do’s and Don’ts a post from: Joomla & SEO Blog.

Joomla 1.6 is stable and very good to start a new website on, but for Search Engine Optimization you have to set some basic parameters for optimal results. So here is a short overview of basic Joomla 1.6 Do’and Don’t for Search Engine Optimization. Let’s start with the Do’s… Global Configuration SEO Settings Like the … Continue reading

Want to read more? Check out Joomla & SEO Blog.

Most people are aware that Joomla is an international community and consists of much more than the English-only Joomla.org family of sites.  Many non-English countries have their own language-specific resources such as localized websites, documentation and forums.  So how do we bring internationalization to the main Joomla.org sites?

How can non-English community members find local Joomla resources?
Currently, by using a (local) search engine.

How does the current Joomla.org family of sites engage international non-English community members?
The only current option for the main information on the Joomla.org family of sites is to utilize an online translation tool such as Google Translate.  However, there are language-specific forums on forum.joomla.org

Possible Improvement - Local Language Information Pages
In June of 2010 I participated in the JoomStew radiostacja show along with fellow guests Sander Potjer and Radek Suski titled “Measuring Community”, a discussion around a chapter in Jono Bacon’s book, The Art of Community.

During this interesting show, I was able to discuss localization with Sander.  Sander is very active in the Dutch community (joomlacommunity.eu) and pointed out that the connection between the joomla.org sites and the local non-English community sites needs improvement.  When I asked what he thought would be a way to accomplish that, he referred me to another international website that displays a small notice based on the language detected in your browser settings pointing you to information in your own language.

The Joomla.org sites have always been unintentionally English-centric.  To increase discovery of the many non-English Joomla communities, we started an initiative to compile international information pages which would provide a gateway to these local communities and some translated “About Joomla” information.  To accomplish that we compiled a short English page with the most important resources and put it on the docs.joomla.org website.  After a call for volunteers to start developing these pages, the response was amazing - the main document has already been translated to nearly 30 different languages/countries!  Thanks to everyone who contributed so far!

For the next phase, it’s now time to make the international pages available on the Joomla.org site.  We hope to have more information on this phase soon.

Meanwhile, if the information in your language has not been translated yet at http://docs.joomla.org/Joomla_info_page and you are willing to help out, please contact Peter Martin via the forum: pe7er. Don't forget to include the ISO tags for your language/country (en-GB for British English). Thanks!

There are a few people whose every word I follow and try to incorporate into my business, and Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com and Teaching Sells is one of them.

In 2008, Brian launched his Teaching Sells course. A complete guide to setting up and running and online paid membership websites. It was insanely popular, I joined up right when his doors opened, and so did people like Aaron Wall (of SEO Book).

After 2 rounds of students, Brian closed his doors and has been busy im[...]

Not so long ago a previous update was released for Joomla 1.5; I mentioned that updating your 1.5 site was pretty easy and well, its time to do it again.  Joomla 1.5.7 was announced as a security update some days back and I thought I'd mention it in case you hadn't heard the news... 

Note: its great to see how quickly reported issues with Joomla are being solved by the core kadra narodowa and everyone contributing to the project!  With each release comes fixes as well as improvements to Joomla - expect an updated OpenID library, upgraded TinyMCE, better karta handling and more with Jooma 1.5.8

Jomsocial are offering a big discount on their award winning social platform for Joomla, It ends August 2nd, but you can get three months access for only $45!

I've seen several people ask the question now: what happened to ?tp=1 in Joomla 1.6?

For those who have no przedsięwzięcie what ?tp=1 means, this is a method to show locations of module positions within a Joomla template.

 

We have finished most parts of the Development Coordinator Summit over the last few days. We have had some pretty intense days of discussing our agenda, that covered the following topics:

1. Development Vision
2. Healthy Development Team
3. Operational and Organisational Structure
4. Roadmap

This mail is a summary of the outcome of these topics. When you read it is important to understand that we only covered the highlights and have set direction and focus for Joomla development. It will take time, and considerable effort from everyone involved in the project to achieve our goals, but we are excited. It's impossible to share every detail but the following presents a summary of each major topic.

During the past years the amount of Joomla community channels grown substantially. New ideas were developed and many of them came with a new subsite somewhere in the joomla.org family of sites. Today actual Joomla information can be found on many places, you possible need to visit several sites to keep yourself up to date, maybe too many meanwhile...? And are all these subsites still needed and relevant? Or do we need to combine them in a new improved channel that fit all our needs?

If you liked the tool mentioned in my previous post about Joomla and SEO, you might also want to read this article on my other Blog. This one is about the new Content analysis page in Google webmaster central: Google helps with Meta description and title errors Post from: Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com ©2009 Joomla SEO Blog by [...]

Post from: Joomla SEO pamiętnik internetowy by Pathos-Seo.com

Superior SEO + limitless flexibility + seamless JomSocial styling = Joomlashack's new template, JS Community! Built on our powerful CSS 960 grid framework, JS Community is a sleek yet sophisticated approach to design. It comes loaded with over 30 module positions, multiple source-ordered column layouts, easy to customize CSS files, and much more! And most exciting- JS Community is ready for JomSocial, the best social networking extension available for Joomla. Need to offer community tools to your audience but want a consistent, seamless look and feel? Try out our demo and see how JomSocial and JS Community work together for a perfect social networking experience. JS Community is chock full of powerful, state-of-the-art features. Check out Community's full bag of tricks, including:

This is a report from the Joomla Leadership Summit now underway in San Jose, CA. Members of the Community Leadership ekipa (CLT), Production Leadership kadra narodowa (PLT) and the board of Open Source Matters (OSM) are busy discussing the best foot forward in all areas of the project.

The PLT had our summit in the days leading up to the overall Leadership Summit. We'll share shortly the results of that summit, but we wanted to get some direct feedback from the community on an issue that affects many.

We decided to make a small change to the way Joomla versions are numbered. If you have read about the new development cycle, you know we now have a new Joomla version every six months and one long-term-support (LTS) release every 18 months. Versions 1.6 and 1.7 are six-month releases and the next release in January 2012 will be an LTS release. This way, users have a choice. They can get the latest and greatest version by updating with improvements every six months, or they can have a more stable feature set with updates every 18 months.  Maintenance and security releases will be done as necessary for both LTS and STS releases during their support periods.

To try to make this as clear as possible to users, we have decided that the long-term releases will always be labeled as x.5 releases. For example, 3.0 and 3.1 will be regular, short-term six-month releases. The following version would be 3.5, indicating that it is a LTS release. Version 3.5 will be supported for 18 months. In the meantime, we will release 4.0 and 4.1. The LTS replacement for 3.5 will be 4.5, 18 months later.

We would like to present two options to the community to decide how to proceed with this versioning approach. 

Click on the diagram above to view a larger version.

The first option (Option #1) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 1.8. The subsequent short -term releases would be 2.0 and 2.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 2.0.1 or 2.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 2.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because it would be the only version to not follow the x.5 numbering, but this version number would naturally follow 1.6 and 1.7.

The second option (Option #2) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 2.5. The subsequent short -term releases would be 3.0 and 3.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 3.0.1 or 3.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 3.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because there would be no version numbers between 1.7 and 2.5, but this version number would follow the future versioning strategy (also there would be backwards compatibility with Joomla 1.5).

Vote for the option that makes the best sense here:

http://tinyurl.com/jversion

 

 

 

 

 

The Joomla! project and Open Source Matters would like to invite the members of our community to take a look at the proposed 2011 budget and then submit your feedback through Monday April 18th.

A long and winding road...

We realize that unveiling our 2011 budget in April of 2011 doesn’t exceed expectations in the timeliness category. Even though this has much taken longer than we wanted, the good news is that some new planning and budgeting processes have been put into place that will enable  more inclusive and collaborative efforts moving forward, as well as enabling improved goal setting and planning among each of the Joomla! project’s leadership teams.

A collaborative effort

One cząstka of these new processes consisted of forming a budget committee from members of the Production Leadership ekipa (Chris Davenport), the Community Leadership reprezentacja narodowa (Wendy Robinson and Matt Lipscomb) and the board of Open Source Matters (Phil Locke and Paul Orwig). This committee has been working together over a trudne dni of months to integrate each of the leadership team's revenue generating estimates and funding requests into a budget that is intended to help support the goals of each leadership ekipa and continue to strengthen the Joomla! project’s overall financial position.

Goal setting included as part of planning process

Another new aspect of the budget process involved asking members of the Production Leadership ekipa (PLT), Community Leadership kadra narodowa (CLT), and Open Source Matters (OSM) to each put some effort into planning their goals and priorities for 2011, as a predecessor to help them focus on what resources (financial and other) would be needed to achieve those goals. This planning effort has the following benefits:

1. Allows our budget to be a more effective tool for supporting the project's planned priorities for the upcoming year.
2. Allows each leadership reprezentacja narodowa to better understand what the other leadership teams are planning to work on, which will improve inter-team collaboration and support.
3. Allows the community to be aware of goals and priorities for the upcoming year, which will improve transparency and openness and enable increased support and volunteer contributions.
4. Will make it easier to bring in more sponsorship contributions, due to prospective sponsors having a better understanding about what initiatives their contributions will be supporting.

Next steps

Once the community feedback okres has closed, the following next steps will be taken to complete the formal approval of the 2011 budget:

1. PLT, CLT, and OSM will review community feedback and offer suggestions.
2. The budget committee will potentially revise the budget based on step 1.
3. PLT, CLT, and OSM will review revised budget.
4. OSM will formally review and (if acceptable) approve the budget.
5. 2011 budget will be published, along with PLT, CLT, and OSM goals for 2011.

Please discuss this blog post on the Joomla! People site.

I was excited to come across a recent pamiętnik internetowy post about free Joomla templates, and their quality. Excited because Joomlashack managed to snag not just the #1 for Jamba, but also the #4 spot for Optimus!

Of course, having people validate how great you think your stuff is is great and all, but with respect to the free templates, I was especially pleased.

Joomlashack takes its free templates very seriously. We don't consider them commercial link-bait, or poor quality PR engines. Si [...]

The following draft text has been drawn up in order to clarify and further define the nomination and election process to OSM board positions. We invite you to submit your feedback via the Joomla! People site łącze at the bottom. Thank you! 

Elections: Two calendar periods are generally planned for elections each year: April and October. Exceptions can be made if the board vitally needs specific skills (for example, if the Treasurer leaves).

Number of Board members: The recommended number of board members to carry out the responsibilities of OSM is 13. This number may fluctuate up to 15 or down to 11.

Term Limits: All future board appointments will be for one 2-year trudne dni with exceptions possible if the board vitally needs specific skills (Treasurer, Legal Council).

Selection Criteria:

• Community: nominees should have a strong track record of successfully collaborating with, enabling others, and earning the respect of the Joomla! community.
• Character: nominees should have demonstrated integrity, with a history of acting honestly, fairly and openly when in leadership roles.
• Experience and Expertise: nominees being proposed for specific roles should have strong experience and expertise in those areas.
• Success: nominees should be able to point to a history of success and leaving previous roles in a better state than when they arrived.
• Diversity: our goal is to work toward, and ambicja gender and cultural diversity. We are committed to seeking nominations from all talented and dedicated members of our international Joomla! community.

Election Procedure:

• Public nominations open on the 1st of the month and close on the 14th. Nominations must be made with the agreement of the nominee.
• The OSM board examines the candidates and suggests names to the Community Oversight Committee (COC) before the end of the month.
• The COC approval takes 10 business days to approve or reject the names.
• OSM contacts the successful and unsuccessful nominees. 

Click here for discussion and feedback on the Joomla! People site.

(This post is in reply to one that Dries Buytaert wrote on OStatic.com)

I agree with Dries that Open Source CMS' are putting more power into the hands of people who may not know or want to learn code, and that as their learning curves get less steep we will see more people jumping into creating and growing their websites themselves; depending on the type of website they want to have.

We've of course seen the *huge* acceptance of wordpress for simple content publishing (read: 'blogging') amongst all sorts of people ranging from tech pros to near-luddites.  As people use more websites that have richer feature sets everyday they'll no doubt want to see the functionality of those sites in their own; for a while yet, though it may not require custom coding, I think the role of 'web master' or 'web developer' or whatever-you-want-to-call-them will be around for quite some time.

That role will continue to exist but may change to focus on conceptualizing the end result and making it happen with the right combination (and configuration) of 3rd biba modules/extensions; whether through just hand-holding/teaching people wanting to develop their own sites or actually putting the pieces together themselves.

I'm really excited for Mark Boulton's redesign of Drupal 7; right now a major hindrance to non-technical people using Drupal is its stratified admin interface, which often leads to developers custom-creating UX per-project to suit each client's administrative needs.

To help people jump-start their web projects we've taken a hard look at another Open Source CMS called Joomla for example, and come up with a packaged solution called Seedling (http://www.plantseedling.com).

Seedling's distribution of Joomla is cool because it comes pre-configured and loaded with a suite of extensions and easily changeable theme; so people can develop their web projects a lot quicker and with more power under the hood.  Plus, it comes with optional email/ticket support - so new adopters of Joomla can get help when they need it.

Until core installs of Open Source CMS' are a lot more user friendly I think solutions like Seedling will really help bridge the gap for those folks who want to learn via DIY and/or can't afford the services of web developers.

In preparation for the Joint Summit (CLT, PLT, OSM) sheduled for July 29 - 31, 2011, at eBay in San Jose, California, the Joint Summit Committee has compiled a list of proposed goals for discussion at the three day meeting. The list below is shared with the community for feedback before finalizing the meeting agenda.

The goals include planning and discussing the following topics (not presented in any particular order):

• Who are we building Joomla for? Who is our target audience and thus who should we build new features for?
   
• Better collaboration
   
• The future of the Project
   
• The Joomla Project common goals
   
• The Joomla Project strategy
   
• Evaluate our project structure
  • The future role, if any, of the Community Oversight Committee
  • Better understand how our teams function
     
• Talk about processes (conflict resolution, budget process, ….)
   
• How to attract more developers?
   
• Review Sponsored Development program
   
• Review our Mission, Vision and Values
   
• Collaboration strategy with international communities
   
• Joomla! World Conference 2012 - Setup a committee, define goals
   

To comment on this list of goals please visit: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1220-Joint+Leadership+Summit+Goals.html?groupid=714