Joomla! Community Magazine™

So, if you followed my tips in Part 1 of this series, you’ve hopefully carefully planned out your migration strategy, identified all the links you need to migrate, created your redirects, and at some point, you’re ready to push the button and migrate your site. Before you do this, and for a period of time after the new site launches, you’ll need to make sure you monitor your website traffic in case you missed anything, or ended up with problems such as redirect loops or drops in conversion rate. This article will focus on how you can ensure you are monitoring your website appropriately using Joomla and other tools so that you quickly pick up on developing problems in the few weeks and months following a migration.

Sitebuilders, you know the scenario; a new client has no idea about Joomla and what it does. They want a new web site or web app and they don’t care what CMS you use and they need it do something very specific, something bespoke.

The “core” components provide several valuable features like tags, versioning, and ACL settings per category. These features are available for integration and use in third-party components, but too often these components ignore them. Here is a list of the ”core” features I look for when I evaluate components. Think about them, and you might find that you want them, too.

We’ve all done it – worked for months on a migration, put in all the finishing touches, uploaded it to our server and closed our eyes (and probably crossed our fingers) while turning our shining new website live to the world. I expect many of us have also done this without thinking about the changes we might have made in the process, and particularly without considering any impact this might have on our position in search engines. I hope that this series of articles will give you some ‘top tips’ of things you must do before, during and after your migration to maintain your hard-earned search engine optimisation and avoid incurring penalties post-migration.

Is your Joomla website slow? You should definitely work on that: users hate slow websites, and they may leave your site earlier then they otherwise would, resulting in low conversion. Any site that needs more then 2 seconds to load could be at risk. Also, Google even says that site speed is used to determine your place in their rankings.

What is nice to know: it should not be that hard to improve the speed of your Joomla website. While sometimes you can hear stories that Joomla is slow, this will usually be because of incorrect setup or bad hosting companies, and you can work on both. Especially if you know what to look at, improving the speed of your Joomla website may not be too hard, and making it load in less then a second should be possible.

Installing Joomla in production environments - in this article I start with a basic, high-level explanation of how Apache's document root works, which I hope will give you a clear understanding of how you can easily install multiple instances of Joomla under a single domain. Next, I list some of the benefits of creating separate web-help sites for individual products. And, finally, I cover the options available for installing Joomla in your production environments.

Have you ever wanted to add a link to an article from within another article,without adding that linked article to your site's Main Menu, but but were frustrated trying to get your favorite selection of modules to be displayed with the article? The answer to managing the display of modules lies in using a Hidden Menu. (Also called an Invisible Menu.)

A fresh new site needs to be built and you’re faced with a decision. To build this site with the current Joomla! Long Term Support (LTS) release or the latest Joomla! Short Term Support (STS) release? The answer is, of course, it depends. Your experience will be different depending on the choice you make. This article will cover categories of site owners and what they expect for their sites, key points for consideration and some example scenarios.

The most important feature that was released with version 3.2 of Joomla, in my opinion, is without a doubt the "Joomla Extension Finder aka Install from Web" which allows you to install extensions listed in the JED (Joomla Extensions Directory) in a simple and rapid way directly from the control panel.

This is the first in a short series of articles intended to help technical writers and instructional designers learn how to build Joomla web-help systems. However, if you’re not a professional writer, you may still have an interest in the topic. For example, maybe you’re a one-person development shop, or you work for a small company without technical writers, and you want to write and publish your own software documentation. If you fall into the latter category, you will find these articles are geared toward beginners, as most writers will have less experience with Joomla. But, I hope they will give you a few ideas on how you might build your own publishing platform.