Joomla! Community Magazine™

Seeing how are open source technologies can make a real difference in someone's life is something quite special, but see how it can help a nation to develop into the central hub for technology is just inspiring.

Joomla!Day Kenya was my first visit to Africa, and I really didn't know what to expect. I had heard there was a lot of suport for Open Source technologies in Kenya and Africa as a whole, with there already being several Joomla! user groups in existence across Africa, but none in Kenya ... yet.

Choosing the URL to use for your business can be a difficult decision - so many factors to consider!  Will customers remember it?  Does it say what you do?  How well will it optimise in search engines?

We've all seen the social sharing icons which appear at the bottom of many websites encouraging people to like and share your content, but what if you could have the message that your visitors are pushing out to their social streams become more interactive? Google+ has just introduced 'interactive Posts' which help your shared posts stand out from the crowd - this could be a real game changer for many websites and an interesting way to develop social interaction with your visitors' networks.

Keeping up with changes from Google can be rather challenging at the best of times, and some of the more recent changes and advanced features added to their popular analytics platform have gone largely unnoticed by many people. This series of articles will take you through some of the more recent additions, and also highlight some useful features that you may not have previously explored.

Joomla! is fast becoming one of the most popular content management systems in the world, powering almost 3% of the web and exceeding 30 million downloads - the chances are during your day you probably browse at least one website using Joomla!. Many businesses rely on Joomla! for their web presence, but often business owners are not empowered to ensure that their website is being managed properly, or is up to date with the latest security patches.  This article gives Joomla! website owners some simple tips to ensure that your website is up to date, and some tools to make that process easier!

Google has been tweaking its algorithms (the systems it uses to identify how relevant it's links are to the search terms entered) over the years, with a view to improving the user experience, and promoting results which are more relevant and abide by their recommended guidelines relating to search engine optimisation. Two updates were released in recent history which have hit some sites particularly hard. This article will cover the Google update first seen in February 2011 and later rolled out internationally in August 2011 known as 'Panda' or 'Farmer', and the more recent Penguin update.

You may have noticed recently that extra bits of information have started appearing in search results, perhaps photos of the author, reviews of a product, maps showing the location of a store or links which allow you to jump to a certain location within a page. 

With the abundance of social networks that spring up on an almost daily basis, you would be forgiven for emitting a dramatic sigh to hear that you need to start paying attention to another social network. But this time, really, you do!

In the summer of 2011, Virya Technologies had reached a point where the company needed to expand due to the volume of work, but also wanted to invest in the community and provide an opportunity for a young person to gain employment, training, and involvement in Open Source technologies.