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Adding social czwarta władza to your Joomla site

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

In mid-2011, the Production Leadership Team (PLT) announced a new release cycle for the Joomla CMS.  Rather than a "feature-based" release, which could take years for a new version to be released, the PLT chose a "time-based" release strategy.  Additionally, a new version numbering system was adopted to provide standardization to the versions.  If you are unfamiliar with this, or simply don't understand it fully, I recommend reading Mark Dexter's article in the Joomla Community Magazine this month.  The PLT's development strategy makes it clear that new versions will be released every 6 months and explains the goals behind this strategy.  The JED supports this strategy, however it has been a learning experience with new versions being released so quickly in comparison to the former release method.

Currently, you will see the version badges on listings for 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5.  While this isn't ideal, it has helped developers and users incrementally move to the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version (2.5.4).  This cycle (from 1.5 to 2.5) has given the CLT the opportunity to review, in real-life, how the new cycle affects adoption rates on both Short Term Support (STS) and LTS versions and how best to adapt the JED to these new changes.  

The following outlines the way versions will be handled in the JED:

LTS versions will be listed in the directory for 180 days (6 months) after End of Life (EOL).

STS versions will NOT be listed in the directory, instead a "Series" will included both STS and LTS versions - which means that starting with version 3.0 you will see a badge for "Joomla 3x Series" and developers, if they mark that version as available on their listing, will need to ensure that the extension is compatible with the latest release of the series.

This means....

Version 1.5 - Will be listed in the directory for 6 months after it's EOL.

Version 1.6 - Will be removed (see below for more details)

Version 1.7 - Will be removed (see below for more details)

Version 2.5 - Will be listed in the directory for 6 months after it's EOL.

Joomla 3x Series - Will be listed in the directory for 6 months after the EOL of the LTS version in the series (version 3.5)

 

What happens with 1.6 and 1.7 badges?

The versions of 1.6 and 1.7, still currently in the directory, will be removed as of April 30, 2012.  There are still a substantial amount of listings that have not marked 2.5 compatibility and the JED would like to give these developers an opportunity to get caught up.  If you have a listing that isn't marked as 2.5 compatible but is marked as 1.6/1.7 compatible, you have until the end of the month to mark 2.5 compatibility

As of April 1, 2012, the JED will only accept listings that are compatible with the latest Joomla STS Version (2.5).  You may still mark the extension as 1.5 compatible, but no 1.5, 1.6, 1.7-only listings will be accepted any longer.

What happens with pending listings that are not 2.5 compatible?

These listing submissions will recieve an error code and won't be published until a 2.5 version is available and marked/uploaded on the listing.  Please remember that if you mark both 1.5 and 2.5 compatible icons, you must attach both versions to the listing and the download łącze must point to a page that includes both downloads.

 

To comment and discuss this blog, please visit the JPeople site at http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1473-the-jed-and-version-support.html?groupid=714

A while back I talked about Do You Have a Refund Policy, and how important they are. Another similar need is a privacy policy.

We are updating our privacy policy at Joomlashack and we came across a handy tool to generate a privacy policy by answering some basic questions about your business and website.

http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG/#form

This has to be one of the best ways I have seen yet to explain web standards and usability to clients.

Next time you find your self in that situation, show this handy video.

One of the new features in Joomla 1.6 is more choice for the template in the administrator backend. I was able to spend a few minutes with Andrea Tarr of Tarr Consulting (www.tarrconsulting.com), the brains behind this new accessible admin template, and ask her about it.

Joomla! 1.5 was notable for the inclusion of the Beez template. For the first time Joomla was shipping with a solution for creating accessible websites. With 1.6 we will be extending that to the backend with the addition of the accessible zarządca template Hathor.

It's early yet, but the early results from the Joomlashack 2009 Joomla User Survey are already sparking conversation about who uses Joomla, and how.

Launched 10 days ago, the Joomla User Survey has already received more than 1,000 responses, yielding a rich pile of data about many important Joomla-related questions, including:

• How Joomla users view GPL vs Non-GPL Extensions
• How Joomla security and bug releases are perceived and handled
  
• Usage of free vs commercial templates

And many more questions. Read on to hear some early results and to comment on the survey!

Haven't taken the survey yet? Want to be entered to win over $1,000 in prizes! Then take the survey!

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 radio 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 początek 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!

If you are a heavy user of Jomsocial, you can get their $350 developer license for only $299 until Friday 26th August. Upgrade to Unlimited Developer Access and use JomSocial on any sites and receive UNLIMITED support for all your sites.

Simplweb is a Joomla hosting SaaS, and one aspect of the fully managed service we provide is helping small businesses with SEO. At Simplweb we encourage our customers to use fast templates for their site (and we include some blazingly-fast ones pre-installed). Why? Because Google loves websites that load fast. It's been a factor for some time in Adwords rankings, and last year they announced that page speed was a factor in the general search engine rankings. Finding the right domain name for your Joomla website can be very difficult, so here are some ideas and tips on how to find the right one for you.

You are reading a post from: Joomla SEO Blog by PathosSeoBlog.com

Finding Your Best Domain Name | Joomla Domain Name

I am very excited that some great new resources to learn how to Joomla are now available, Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (2nd Edition) and Fundamentals of Joomla! (Video Training)!

The second edition of the book is an update of the best selling book on Joomla, bringing it up to date with the latest v[...] This week iJoomla is offering discounts for popular extensions from corePHP and StackIdeas when you purchase a copy of the iJoomla SEO extension - a great deal to improve your Joomla site's ranking and get some free tools into the bargin.

You probably didn't notice, but recently we have republished the "Support Joomla!" page. We also have a new "Support Joomla!" module for anyone to use. This is exciting because for the past several years we have not been able to ask the Joomla! Community for financial support. What happened?

As I mentioned back in February, at the advice of our attorneys, and with a lot of reflection, the board of Open Source Matters (OSM)  had been exploring the possibility of "correcting" its corporate charter. Those corrections have now been made, and this post will explain what that means. The specific changes could not be discussed previously because they were legal advice, but now we can do so. There are complicated legal and financial reasons for making these changes which I am going to try to explain in this post.   It will be a little heavy going, so before I początek let me stress the two main points:

• OSM will always remain a not for pożytek organization.
• This change will allow OSM to ask for money for support of the Joomla! Project.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  Do you need to come up to speed quickly on Joomla 1.6? Have we got some great resources for you, listed below by area of interest. Yesterday I showed how to Hide Columns When Editing the przód End of Joomla as it often causes overlap issues that make editing difficult. In this post I'll show a quick and easy way to show different content to different users. Being able to show different content to registered and logged in visitors is a very common request for a Joomla site. By default, you can have Joomla show the "intro" copy to guests and they must to log in to see the rest. But what if you want to show some specific content to guest visitors, and then different content to registered users once they have logged in. There are a couple of extensions that give this functionality, but as a rule of thumb, I'll always trying and use the core if I can to get what I want. In this case, I figured out a simple method that worked for my needs.

  Recently the Joomla Community Workgroup came up with an inicjatywa to share just how much work is being done with the wider community by way of a monthly ekipa report. You can see the source of the combined report I have compiled below here.

  It's an incredible snapshot of the 100's of volunteers working on this part of the Joomla Project. Thanks must also to go to the support OSM ( www.opensourcematters.org ) gives to our project, as well as the Joomla Production Workgroup.

  Read on for the full report, it's amazing!