Joomla! Community Magazine™

When it comes to setting up Joomla, we all think that just setting it up is everything you need to know. In this post I'll teach you a few of the new things Joomla has come out with that all site owners and newbies should know about before setting up.

If you own or manage a Joomla website, then you need to understand the importance of continual optimization and SEO tweaking to achieve the results you want in the search engines. Here are 6 tips that you need to impliment on your website to drive search traffic and gain organic users. 

The first of many virtual events reminds Joomla! newbies and professionals that keeping their Joomla! website updated is not an option it's a responsibility.

A story about how my car was invaded and attacked by a mouse. Usually, you don´t associate a mouse, the animal, with a car. They don´t mix and have nothing in common. At autumn this may change. The mouse may see your car environment as a perfect shelter for the incoming cold winds and wet weather. No less do you associate a mouse, the animal, with website security? Perhaps this will change at the end of this story.

I really appreciate the Joomla in Action sessions because we have an opportunity to strengthen the community and get stuff done. So being part of the Joomla! User Group (JUG) Team, when I found that I could go to the Joomla! World Conference in Vancouver, I wanted to foster new JUGs and assist in supporting existing groups.

Joomla! is an incredibly powerful system out-of-the-box. Naturally, it can be extended through extensions (plugins, components, modules, templates, languages) to increase its functionality and make the site adapt to your needs. That brings us to one of the most common made mistakes in Joomla! site administration: installing too many extensions. Sure, that one might be handy, and hey - why not add that one too? It's common practice not to install too many extensions, and generally teached. However, from personal experience, this isn't followed too often....

From a historical point of view, in computing, we can testify how character representation has evolved. Since the basic binary encoding of 0s and 1s, each bit has added more expressiveness. Today, Joomla 3.5 is here to introduce the current gold standard, full 4-byte Unicode (Utf8mb4).

February 9th was Safer Internet Day. Google offered Gmail users an extra 2 GB of space to perform a quick security audit on their account. The tasks were easy: a quick review of the account recovery information and the connected applications. Even though it took only a few minutes and many will never realize it, the audit will have a big impact for thousands of users who dodged a bullet with their name on it.  Small things can make a big difference. It's the magic of preventative care.

Here are a few of the key mistakes that I've noticed most newbie Joomla users make and how to avoid them. Use the tips below to become an expert Joomla user overnight and avoid all the new user behaviors.

Google Shopping allows Ecommerce stores to embed their products directly within the search experience of the largest search engine in the world.  Many Ecommerce stores rely on Google Shopping to drive sales.  If you are not yet using Google Shopping, this article will explain what it is and how you could start using it. For those who are using Google Shopping feeds, in September 2015, Google is making some changes to its taxonomies which may require you to update your Google Shopping feeds.  These changes must be made by 15th September, so if you're running a Joomla! website with an Ecommerce store and you rely on Google Shopping feeds, make sure you check your feeds!