Joomla! Community Magazine™

With the abundance of e-commerce solutions for Joomla! it is very easy building a great looking on-line store, showcasing your products and effectively convincing your potential customers to add them to the cart. Beautiful images, obvious calls for action, unique selling points and a smooth online shopping experience are easy to setup and help you “seal the deal” with the customer. However, this is only half the story. One of the most overlooked business decisions when building any kind of e-commerce site is the payment method. It’s what affects the very last step of the online shopping experience and the single most frequent reason to lose a sale.

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.

Last month, in our article SEO, Joomla! and your Template we explained that before visiting the pages on a web site, search engines (for instance Google and Yahoo) check for the presence of instructions about the web site on its server. These instructions can be given by two files that are distributed with Joomla! and are normally found in the top level of your Joomla! installation: htaccess.txt and robots.txt.

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.

Many people ask “Is Joomla! good for SEO or not?” and my final answer is: “Yes it is!”.

Joomla! is the ideal software with which you can build any website: business, corporate, education, government, portals etc. At the same time it is one of the easiest content management systems to set up, for many reasons, and good for the purpose of better rankings in search engines too.

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.

When shopping for Joomla! templates, users very often make their choices based entirely on the look and feel the template presents for their content. A user visits the demo pages of a few template manufacturers, looks around and picks a design to represent the content of a new or existing Joomla! web site. What is often overlooked are the ways in which a template is more than skin deep. A template is much more than a web site design: it actually defines the way the web site elements such as HTML, images, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript are sent to the web browser. Have you considered the impact of the these elements to your overall user experience?