Joomla! Community Magazine™

Last month Google sent out its updated guidelines to gain visibility in Google search results. They involve accessing certain .css and .js files (stylesheets and javascripts) on your website. This affects the ranking of results. The following article explains what you need to do to your Joomla website to be in line with these new guidelines.

Remember Mambo? How about the “rhuk-milkyway” template? Take one fair-sized site which to the public eye looked manageable, but beyond held a behemoth of an intranet with hundreds of registered users and six versions of templates pointing to odd morphed versions, each spaghetti-ing between versions, transparent gifs, shaded borders of images, css files and hard-coded JavaScript routines of slideshows... you name it, it was there. It was no small job to make any change at all, let alone move this whole thing to Joomla 3.

This is an important notice on the safety and updating our Joomla 2.5 sites. This text is dedicated to Manuel Rubio, a big enthusiast and contributor to Joomla, who died last May 15. I will always be grateful for the long conversations with him that gave me a broad view of what it means to work for the community, and that was reflected in my support, commitment and work towards the Mexico City JUG community. Rest in peace.

There are times when the project of a site calls for the introduction of texts to be visible by general audiences, but if the visitor wants to see the full article, s/he must log in to the system. The full content is blocked and only after the visitor creates or is granted an access account will s/he be able enjoy the full content of the article.

Delivering transactional emails is considered one of the most recursive and important tasks for a website owner. If your transactional emails fail to reach recipients’ inbox, it will be difficult for you to have the benefits of an automated email transaction. An automated email transaction is heavily dependent on a reliable SMTP server. However, using an ordinary email service provider such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Hotmail has its restrictions. This is because they allow only a certain number of emails to be sent by a particular user per day. You might be thinking what is a smart solution for transactional email delivery and how to configure it?

Ah migration. Many look at it as a chore and it may be. Migration is really an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to reassess goals, clean up messes, increase functionality, security, and efficiency. But many have struggles. The Update Working Group has been established to make the process of migration clearer and easier to find. The group hopes to reach those who haven’t yet migrated and need to.

Many Joomla sites were impacted by the recent Penguin 3.0 update that Google put out a few weeks ago. In this article you will find tips and tricks to help your site recover as well as steps to prepare your website in the future.

Please don't gamble with your Joomla web-site security and never, I mean never, ever, ever, ever use dictionary words for Joomla Super User passwords! Always remember that the internet is full of malicious robots, most often set up by bad people to scan and harvest Joomla and Wordpress administrator passwords and they can do it faster than you can say "Brian Teeman" or "Nick Robertson".

When you sit down at a local coffee shop or free public Wi-Fi hotspot, log into one of your favorite sites, and begin surfing the web, you might as well be handing out business cards with your login IDs and passwords to everyone around you. That’s because sites that don’t have HTTPS encryption provide no protection for the end user. Instead, they leave you vulnerable and exposed. Is that a place you want to put your site’s visitors?

Being part of J and Beyond, has given me the pleasure of seeing old friends again, but also the opportunity to see that particular companies continue to be at the forefront. It is great to see that from the strong foundation that those companies made years ago due to their sponsorship, worldwide Joomla events have been able to take place, as well as other activities that the rest of the community need.