Joomla! Community Magazine™

As the number of websites worldwide continue to grow at an incredibly fast pace, and the race to be at the top of search engine result pages is getting more and more competitive, SEO optimization is hardly a matter of choice any more. If you want to bring more traffic to your website — and not just any traffic, but visitors who are uniquely attuned to and looking exactly for the services and products that you offer, then take the time to optimize your website — it’s free, it’s easy to do, and most importantly, if you do it right, you can see real and tangible results within several months, or even sooner.

The long awaited Joomla! 1.6 is finally here and has been here for about two months now. Joomla! 1.6 introduced a lot of new changes and improvements and it was released 1084 days or 2 years, 11 months, and 19 days after Joomla! 1.5's release. Joomla! is now on a 6-month release cycle and Joomla! 1.7 is scheduled to be released in July 2011.

First off: no, I'm not a bonsai expert. In fact, it takes me a lot of effort to keep the one bonsai tree in my house (which was a gift) alive. Why I'm writing this article about the similarities between bonsai trees and Joomla! then? 

When I ask my school customers about Joomla! and how it helps them do their job, they all have the same answer — they say that what used to take them hours to accomplish before, gets done in minutes with Joomla! — from adding new pages, to creating new events, to managing documents, etc.

This article helps you, especially Joomla! beginners, get started with Joomla! CMS systematically by providing you with good sources of Joomla! tutorials. The selected websites have proven their reliability to many Joomla! users, and to me, for a long time. All sources are thoroughly designed with detailed instructions in both text and videos format so that readers have the best understanding of these tutorials.

I remember when 4K of RAM was considered alot of memory. Granted, this was quite some time ago and things have certainly progressed since then. Today it seems like every other year adds a Giga-byte or two of RAM to the default configuration of our personal workstation. Well, a similar trend is evident with online memory in shared PHP environments.

A step-by-step tutorial on how you can easily create a professional-looking video library with the help of Amazon Web Services and HD FLV Player for Joomla! to provide a true YouTube-like experience for your users without impacting server performance and bandwidth use.

In continuation of the first “CB Delimiter Field Magic” article, as promised I will be presenting some simple CB Delimiter field logic that will give your users the ability to show/embed their YouTube playlist in their user profile. The example given is based on YouTube, but the logic can be easily adapted to support any embedded content hosted on most providers (Vimeo, Google Video, etc.).

In pursuit of the optimal user experience, I usually want to control each aspect of a view. And as there is much more to a good site than a nice colour palette or a funky header image, my interference with an extension’s existing layout goes beyond the scope of CSS alterations. I like to meddle with my site’s views by customizing any output that is generated and that includes Joomla!’s error page.

Community Builder is the most popular extension for Joomla (at the time this article was published). It is filled with features that will help Joomla websites manage online communities. One of the most powerful but perhaps also most overlooked feature is its “delimiter” field. As a member of the CB Team I have used the delimiter field concept on many occasions to address various use cases.

This is the first of a series (2 or more depending on interest expressed) article that will give small use case examples regarding potential use of this powerful feature that will hopefully inspire readers to further investigate.