Joomla! Community Magazine™

Team EaSE discuss passwords in general and stress how important password construction and safety are to the overall security of your website and backups.

In Joomla! we are exceedingly lucky with the quality of extensions provided to make backing up your site easy - just a few parameters and the job is done. In this article Team EaSE shows you three free backup extensions, one plugin and two components.

Today, there are many choices available that allow site builders to quickly configure products, display small product catalogues and enable customers to easily add products to a shopping cart. In most cases, these solutions hand off payment processing to a service like PayPal or Google Checkout. For many, this limited processing is all that is needed and the simplicity translates to much appreciated ease of use. This month, Team EaSE takes a look at five easy-to-use options that will help you quickly offer eCommerce on your Joomla! web site.

As Joomla! has skyrocketed in popularity, Extensions available have multiplied exponentially. eCommerce Extensions, in particular, have seen phenomenal growth and maturation. Those of us who build Joomla! eCommerce sites have watched this growth with great interest and are pleased with the variety of choices now available for the Joomla! the powerful platform.

For many years now, when community members think of eCommerce for Joomla!, VirtueMart springs to mind. Next, consideration often goes to bridging a Joomla! website to another open source solution. This past year, however, two other major players have emerged in the eCommerce space, that being Tienda from Dioscouri Design and redShop from redComponent.

This is the final part of our current Template Tools series and we evaluate Joomlashack, Rumi, Shape5 and YooTheme together with two great articles. The first explains the various techniques of minification and compression (CSS & Javascript) used by Developers and the second examines those very important files - the robots.txt and .htaccess.

In the second of the Template Tools articles, we not only assess three more Joomla! Template Manufacturers: JoomlArt, JoomlaPraise and ProThemer; but we also explore the template folder in your Joomla! install and outline the essentials of Search Engine Optimisation.

Whether you have an e-commerce site or a blog or anything in between, the Holiday Season is a great opportunity for promotion. This month we compare Holiday snow effects, Team Member Nicholas Dionysopoulos has a special present for you and Team Member Sully Sullivan provides a little Holiday Fun!

The enormous power and flexibility of the Joomla! Content Management System adds complexity and time to the task of creating a truly custom template. In this series of articles, Team EaSE looks deeply into several of the Joomla! Template Community's solutions to greatly speed that process.