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46 Joomla Questions Answered

Last week I gave a highly successful free webinar on Joomla as part of promoting the second edition of my book on Safari Books Online.

Ably assisted By Steve Burge of Alledia.com, we gave an hour long intro to Joomla, and were also able to answer many questions.

46 of them to be exact, here are the answers!

Q&A Session for Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide with Barrie North Date: August 19, 2009

Q: What do you recommend for e-commerce, selling things or s[...]

Left to right: Phil Locke, Robert Deutz, Alice Grevet, Jacques Rentzke, Javier Gómez, Marijke Stuivenberg, Andy Tarr, Ryan Ozimek, Dianne Henning. Attending JAB but not in the photo: Paul Orwig

From May 6 - 8 in Kerkrade, The Netherlands, 220 Joomla! community members gathered at the unforgettable JandBeyond conference. Among them were 10 members of the Board of Open Source Matters (OSM). We came as community members to connect, network, and meet again or for the first time many of the people who make the Joomla! Open Source project such an exciting place to be.

The large turnout of OSM members allowed us to share experiences and goals as a group with the attendees, and to talk as a group about impressions and lessons learned from this event. I think everyone will agree that JandBeyond was an invaluable experience in every way!

A high point for all of us was standing together during Ryan's well-attended "State of OSM" session. After he presented achievements from the past year, various members shared OSM goals for 2011.

The goals included increased revenue sources, a new online shop, trademark team streamlining and improvements, upcoming conferences, a Joomla! Supporters club, PR and awareness initiatives, and the simplification and documentation of processes. The presentation was followed by questions from the community about revenue spending and leadership dynamics.

The following is a summary of the question and answer time:

Community: What is the purpose of raising money? What are the plans for that money?

OSM: We want a cushion so that when good ideas come up we will be able to respond in a timely manner. We want to be able to enact good ideas coming out of the community.

Community: Some ideas for the spending of increased revenue:

A Summer of Code funded by Joomla
Getting all of OSM, CLT, and PLT together in one place for the world community to talk about the goals of Joomla
Pay a consulting firm to do an analysis for security and performance
Give a portion of surplus to charity. (OSM: We donated money to SFLC this year)
Do a targeted prize contest with specific requirements with a cash prize to the winner

Community: Would you consider contracting paid development work again?

OSM: We would not do it the way it was done before. If we do consider it again, it would be only for a very specific task.

Community: Congratulations on your structure and leadership but who is going to influence the other parts of the leadership?

OSM: We can use leadership by example. There are processes being put into place that give opportunities to understand, influence and encourage. There will also be a joint summit in July.

Community: There is a perception that OSM can give active guidance.

OSM: It’s not OSM’s role to be the teacher and the others to be students. We can only lead by example. The theme of the koniec tygodnia is community. The community has to come together and work together.

Community: The community feels excluded.

OSM: The leadership is working on getting better communications and clearer channels.

Community: OSM went through organizational training but what about the other teams? Did they get anything from that? It should be that if you are going to be a part of the leadership then you should have professional development.

OSM: OSM was fortunate to be offered a training opportunity. Gunner will be working with leadership skills at the summits.

Community: The way the groups are growing is positive because it spreads out the work and reduces the perception of cronyism. It would be good to see that happening with the CoC.

A common theme that we all came away with was appreciating the chance to interact with so many community members and to listen and be heard.

It was a privilege also to have Louis Landry attend from the Production Leadership kadra narodowa (PLT). He made himself available to talk at length with many attendees. There was much positive feedback about interaction between the community and the leadership throughout the weekend.

An energizing spirit of innovation, passion, communication and respect characterized this event.

The State of OSM Address - Ryan Ozimek from jandbeyond on Vimeo.

To post a comment on this article please visit the thread on the J!People site: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1198-Open+Source+Matters+at+JandBeyond.html?groupid=579

Using Joomla 1.6? Then grabina a copy of the brand new Joomla 1.6 book - now in its 3rd edition - Joomla, A User's Guide! This is the continuation of the wildly popular Joomla - A User's Guide, by Barrie North, published by Prentice. It's sold over 35,000 copies, had rave reviews and been translated into 5 languages. Joomla - A User's Guide has been the standard bookshelf reference for Joomla since 2007.

One of the most popular Joomla template tutorials on the web (over 1 million page views) is now updated for Joomla 1.6. The new version also features a new layout guide based on the 960 grid by Nathan Smith.

The Joomla 1.6 template tutorial is based on three increments.

• The first is a simple blank or skeleton Joomla template to understand how Joomla 1.6 uses a template.
• The second begins to use the 960 grid to produce a pure tableless CSS layout with collapsible columns.
• The third template uses a real world wzornictwo and build a complete template, showing you how to use images in your design.

Just over a week ago, the PLT had a summit in San Jose, CA and asked the community to vote on the next version number of Joomla. There were two options and both had their pros and cons. Calling the January 2012 release Joomla 1.8 would have provided continuity with the currently available 1.6 and 1.7 releases, but would have required explaining why it was the exception to the rule that x.5 means a long-term release. Calling the January 2012 release Joomla 2.5 would provide consistency going forward (and backwards to Joomla 1.5), but would be an odd "jump" in the numbering since there will be no Joomla 2.0. There were plenty of questions and much discussion around the options, but now the vote is in.

 

 

 

Click the design above for a larger version.

Last week a great new directory was launched at joomla.org, the Joomla Resource Directory. Its a place where those that offer Joomla services can advertise their Joomla services.

There are already many different categories, and it looks like that the listings will be free, but with an option for paid listings.

The official blurb reads:

"In response to overwhelming interest and requests from the Joomla community, the Joomla Project is pleased to announce the Joomla[...] This past weekend, July 29-31, was the Joomla Leadership Summit, held at eBay in San Jose, California. Members of the Production Leadership team (PLT), Community Leadership ekipa (CLT), and Open Source Matters (OSM) were in attendance for a discussion of the Joomla project, its leadership, and its future direction.

Last week I gave a highly successful free webinar on Joomla as part of promoting the second edition of my book on Safari Books Online.

Ably assisted By Steve Burge of Alledia.com, we gave an hour long intro to Joomla, and were also able to answer many questions.

46 of them to be exact, here are the answers!

Q&A Session for Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide with Barrie North Date: August 19, 2009

Q: What do you recommend for e-commerce, selling things or s[...]

On Thursday November 11, 2010, the New England Joomla User Group gathering some of the sharpest thinkers in net Marketing at one event to share their Social media vision, strategies and discuss ways to help businesses feel 'in command' of their marketing while keeping pace with today's agile net marketing environment.  The event is World Usability Day New England, it’s happening at the Marlboro College Graduate School from 8:15am – 12:00 noon and you're invited to attend!

A few years ago, fluid width templates were all the rage. Accessibility guys loved them, and it was cool to grab the corner of your browser window and see all that content slide around. Heck, my original Joomla template tutorial published at joomla.org even showed you how to make them. We even sold templates that had the more advanced "jello layout" (fixed side columns and fluid middle). But now, at Joomlashack, we don't make fluid templates, but focus on fixed width templates. I firmly believe they are misplaced on today's web.

Give us six days, and we'll help you make a koncepcja for a successful, content-rich website.

That's the pomysł behind our new six day mini-course "Creating a Content-Rich Website."

When you are starting on your path to create a website, you have to understand some key differences between a old-school static/HTML type site and one built with a modern Content Management architektura (CMS) like Joomla.

This special 6 lesson mini-course will show you how to take a generic and "static" business website and propel it into web 2.0

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:

First 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...

As 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 impuls of using an external service to provide comments on a site - Disqus is under sklep wielkopowierzchniowy 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.

Thirdly, 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 data and having a 3rd party 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 test it simply by posting a comment below.

Joomla with its standard well thought out structure will give you a perfect platform to get your keyword clusters together and boost your website into the search engine ranking of your main keyword, just read here on how to set things right...

Post from: Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com

Back in November, Joomlashack was preparing for its annual Charity Contest, we saw that an effort had started to raise donations from the Joomla community for Doctor's without borders. We decided to match $1000 in donations from Joomla users! We are excited to say that the Joomla community has been able to match our donation and last week we donated our $1000 to Doctor's without Borders. If you'd like to start out 2010 with helping 200 children with a high energy meal, head over and donate just $35 right now!

This is just a short note to say that we've asked the arena Admins to archive the White Papers arena while the Production Leadership ekipa works on a replacement in conjunction with the rebooting of developer.joomla.org and the commencement of new development initiatives this year.  The content will be kept for some time as there is good material in there to work off.  More information about a replacement process will be forthcoming as soon as we can make it available to you.

A few years ago we created a site called JoomlaFeed - our mission was to create an online space where people interested in Joomla could catch up on nowina from across the Web; including snippets from the Core reprezentacja narodowa as well as extension developers, community advocates and a host of others.

The site's been successful in so far as having a number of people subscribe to its aggregated RSS feeds as well as visit joomlafeed.com regularly but I think it can do more.

So, we're taking the occasion for rebuilding JoomlaFeed in Joomla 1.5 as an opportunity to see what you all think of the site and would like from it.

Please visit http://www.joomlafeed.com and post your comments! (There's a hiperłącze at the top of the site)