Joomla! Community Magazine™

What do you think about the administrator panel of Joomla! 3.x? The opinions are split. I for one got some serious negative feedback from my clients not wanting to upgrade, saying that the panel is not user friendly. Some of them said they were used to the old panel and it's hard for them to make the learning curve once again. Add to that the fact that most templates are not designed for RTL (right-to-left) languages, and in an RTL country like Israel, you are stuck. 

Everyday there are countless websites set up on the Internet and thousands of websites built with Joomla. So if you are not actively implement the ads for your website on the search engines, it’ll gradually be forgotten. Joomla Users certainly are very interested in Joomla SEO. Beside the basic support functions Joomla SEO Setting, there are too many different choices so that you can feel overwhelming.

“I want my website to integrate with Facebook.” It might sound specific, but it’s not. Facebook is a huge website and Joomla is an ever evolving CMS so the ways the two can work together are varied and interesting. Being clear with what you want (and don’t want) will help you get the Facebook integration you want on your website.

Nobody wants to have their website get hacked. And yet almost everyone has some reason to ignore security measures. This article talks about "hackers", however "crackers" would be a better name. Hacking is the ingenious use of tools (e.g. software) for purposes that differ from normal use. Cracking is the unauthorized entry of a website to do things that are not allowed by the owner. Because cracking is often referred to as "hacking", I’ll reluctantly use the word “hack” in this article.

If your clients want a simpler backend to their websites, don’t log them in to an 'admin' template – serve them a 'client' template.

To SEO or not to SEO, that is the question! There is a wide variety of views on the topic, whether it is necessary to use specific extensions that improve SEO positioning, if it is a good idea to employ people to help with this and to create strategies etc….or, whether that doing all of this won’t pay off as you are forced to change strategy each time Google makes changes to their SEO policy...

At the request of many of our foreign users, we found a unique way to translate our Joomla developer tool.

This article summarizes the first hour of my introductory course to Joomla. It's a bit "thick" as it’s about system architecture concepts for which the user does not normally have professional knowledge. So try to go slowly, be patient and don’t get discouraged. Draw the examples in the text, copy the pictures and you will see that in the end you had fun.

Google’s algorithm is constantly being modified to show “quality sites” in their search results. Many things like site speed, information architecture, and page design are all contributing factors to your SEO. Search Engine Optimization has many aspects; one of the most important is the integration all of your online marketing tactics and making them work together. If you have a Joomla! Website, your techniques need to be adjusted to work with this particular Content Management System (CMS).

According to W³Techs, as of the beginning of July 2013, 63% of all Joomla sites are running version 1.x. Of these, some 92% are running version 1.5. That works out to a rather large 58% of all Joomla sites running 1.5! The other 5% are mostly version 1.6 and 1.7. [Aside: if your site is one of those 5% please just upgrade now. It's not going to be that painful and you are a sitting duck for hackers. By "now" I mean stop reading this and go upgrade. Seriously.]

So why is the number so high? There are usually a long list of factors, and most of them are valid. Here are the ones I hear regularly: