For Drupal/Joomla Site Owners
30 December 2011 Keep your site from getting taken hostage
All too frequently we hear from customers who have handed over the login details for their domain registrar (GoDaddy, NameCheap etc) only to have their web designer transfer the domain to another registrar that is outside the customer's control. The end result is of course that the customer then becomes dependent on that web designer and must beg and plead (and sometimes even pay fees reaching into the hundreds of dollars) just to get control of their own domain again. In a similar vein, many web design companies that also offer (or insist) on hosting your site for you will not provide hosting control panel access. This is a red flag, because it makes it impossible to save a backup of your site, again making you dependent on that web designer / webmaster. Please, at all times make sure you maintain control of your domain name(s)!
If you must provide someone with access to your domain name management area, make sure you have a clear idea of what it is they intend to do with that access. If you're using GoDaddy, you can assign someone as an AccountExec, so that they cannot change the account password on you. However, even with AccountExec access they'd be able to transfer the domain to another registrar if you're not careful.
It's your site: make sure you retain full control over it, even if you don't want to manage it on a daily basis!
23 December 2011 Joomla World Conference, San Jose - November 16-18 2012
The Joomla! Project is pleased to announce that the first Joomla World Conference will occur in November 2012. We are very happy that eBay has graciously offered significant support for this event, inviting us to use their facilities in San Jose, California.
Here are the preliminary details for the Joomla! World Conference:
Date: 16th-18th November 2012
Location:
eBay Town Hall
2161 North First Street
San Jose, CA 95131
USA
Tickets: Price for a 3-day Ticket is $199 USD
More details will follow next year.
http://www.joomla.org/announcements/general-news/5398-joomla-world-conference-2012.html
02 February 2011 E-mail Distribution List with Joomla
Recently we needed to set up a simple e-mail distribution list for a client, so that when anyone sends an email to "listname@site.com", it gets sent to a list of recipients.
That sounds like a simple thing, but is not as easy as it appears, at least not with cPanel - in our case, anyway. An unmodified installation of cPanel would normally include a way to create a mailing list (in the Mail area). That uses Mailman. However, some hosts turn this feature off because it uses too much CPU. There are not very many third-part alternatives out there; we looked at Minimalist and Dada Mail, and also looked into installing Mailman manually. This all seemed like overkill for something that should be a simple task.
The other possibility would have been to add an email forwarder in cPanel, using a comma-separated list of recipients. That is apparently possible in some cPanel installations, but not in our case.
The solution we finally settled on is called Mailster, which is a Joomla add-on. It retrieves the mail from a POP3 or IMAP account and sends it to your recipients, using either an SMTP connection or the default Joomla mail settings. It also comes with a Joomla content plugin that allows you to create a signup form within a Joomla article. Getting Mailster configured was pretty straightforward; you just need to know your email address's connection settings for POP3 / SMTP.
If we weren't using Joomla on this customer's site, we might still be looking for a simple distribution list solution. This was a great find, and we hope this helps someone else too.
15 January 2011 Joomla 1.5 Flash Ads with AllVideos Reloaded
For several customers we have needed to find a way to show Flash ads that can also track the clicks on those ads. We needed a way to embed Flash using Joomla's banner system, which lets you insert Custom Banner Code. We use AllVideos Reloaded, so go ahead and download that (it's free!) and consult their help files to get familiar with it.
In a nutshell, we looked at the {flash} Tag/Preset in AllVideos Reloaded, copied and pasted the Player Template Tweaks, and then created our own {flashad} tag so we could customize the player's code to our liking. We are still using the "swf" ('Plain flash embedding'') player that comes with AllVideos Reloaded. No need to create a new player.
Creating your custom Flash tag for AllVideos Reloaded
- Navigate to Components > AllVideos Reloaded > Manage Tags/Presets.
- Click New
- Give it a name. In our case we called it "flashad". This will be the {flashad} you can use in the custom banner code.
- Enter a description
- Skip Version.
- Sampling regex: ^(.+)\.swf$
- Check "Local"
- Skip Playlist
- Player: "Plain Flash embedding" (this is the "swf" player referenced earlier)
- Skip Ripper
- Player Template Tweaks: enter "@MURL@" and "images/banners/@CODE@" (no quotes!).
- Click Save
This allows us to place the following Custom Banner Code in our banner:
See Flash Ads with Joomla's Banner System for how to do that.
15 January 2011 Flash Ads with Joomla's Banner System
You may also want to read Adding a Joomla Banner Ad (Image or Flash).
Joomla's banner system lets you track clicks and impressions on image ads (GIF and JPG). But what about Flash? Even though iPad may be forcing a change in how much Flash advertisers use, it is still pretty common. So how do we track the clicks on a Flash ad? You can't simply upload your SWF to images/banners, select it when creating a banner, and be done with it. If you do that, the ad A) won't appear and B) won't track clicks. Here's our solution (this is for Joomla 1.5):
- Log in to Joomla and create a banner client and a banner in Components > Banner.
- After the banner's been saved, you can find the ID in the right-hand column of Components > Banner > Banners. Give this number to your advertiser along with this FLA file. They can then make their ad and export an SWF.
- After the advertiser sends you the SWF, upload it to images/banners and edit the banner, setting the custom banner code to point to the SWF. There are a number of ways to do this. Our preferred method uses AllVideos Reloaded, and is a small tutorial in itself.
Download a sample Flash FLA file
12 January 2011 Joomla 1.6 is Here!
Joomla 1.6 is finally has finally been released. View a demo at demo.joomla.org.
Some highlights:
- Much finer access control (ACL)
- Better multilingual support
- No more sections; only nested hierarchical categories.
- Mobile-friendly enhancements
- Plugin overrides (using the template folder to avoid core code modification)
- much more!
Upgrading to Joomla 1.6 is not super straightforward yet - it is not built into Joomla just yet. You can check out JUpgrade but you will need to copy files from the /jupgrade folder back to the main site. This is a good thing, because it gives you a chance to check that it is working. You will need to carefully check that your extensions work after the upgrade.
15 December 2010 Joomla 1.6 RC1 Now Available
Joomla has finally announced the first release candidate of Joomla 1.6. The final release is due January 11, 2011, with no current plans for a second release candidate. So, the end (of 1.5) is near!
25 June 2010 Impressions of Joomla 1.6 Beta 3
Well, Joomla came out with another 1.6 beta, and it has certainly come a long way. I remember testing a 1.6 beta two years ago. Here are some highlights;
Access Level Control (ACL)
It now features a robust ACL system, though some of the inheritance rules will take some getting used to. This is often cited as a feature Drupal has and Joomla lacks, but soon enough that will be a moot point. From my understanding there will be just one more beta in about two weeks, and then it should be time for 1.6!
Nested categories
Joomla always suffered from a rigid approach to categorization, with Sections and Categories. A section could contain categories, but there could be no sub-categories. This long-running annoyance has finally been been vanquished with Joomla 1.6. It uses only categories (no more sections!), and they can be nested as deeply as you want. I’m sure at some point someone will nest a category 666 levels down, and run into a terrible bug there … but in theory it should be fine, because a category would simply be assigned to a parent category .. the number of sub-levels should have no bearing on it.
Drupal has of course supported nested categories for a long time, where they are called Taxonomy. I think Drupal’s Taxonomy is still more advanced than Joomla 1.6′s category system, but for many, perhaps most users, just having nested categories is en0ugh. Those who want to do more advance PHP magic will naturally be more inclined towards Drupal anyway, and to words like Taxonomy.
The elimination of Joomla’s sections does mean that template code that relies on section IDs will have to be changed to be 1.6-compatible. It will have to check for category IDs instead. It also opens up an interesting possibility of (for example) using a database query to select only those categories that are nested within the current category. That could come in handy in displaying category ‘blogs’ or headlines in a more automated fashion than creating menu links. And speaking of menu links;
Menu Management
Joomla’s menu management has gotten very slick;
- Changing the menu type is now faster.
- Much more control over the menu items: meta data, page titles, robot rules, page class styling, menu link title & CSS attributes.
- Module assignment from a menu item. You can still assign modules to menu items, but now you can also do this from the menu item itself, rather than having to edit the module separately.
- Batch processing multiple menu items
- Language filtering; show your menu item only for certain languages, or for all of them. Would be nice if you could select several languages and hide it on others, but that may be coming.
- Set template style
Redirect manager
Joomla 1.6 has a new component for managing URL redirects. Presumably this writes to the .htaccess file and created a 301 redirect.
Banner Manager
This is not too different from the 1.5 version, but features “Tracks”, which tracks clicks and impressions in date-filterable and CSV-exportable fashion. Finally we will be able to do some more robust reporting.
I am however baffled that banner clients still have no way to log in and view their banner’s statistics. I think most clients would want that, and offering that ability will help site owners gain more advertisers.
I wrote a Joomla 1.5 hack that got around this by using the “alias” field of the banner client to hold a username. That allows us to associate a banner client with a username, and then we can use that to display banner statistics to a given Joomla user (and only that user). Looks like I will have to port that hack to 1.6. Sigh.
11 August 2009 Let your users have their own calendars!
A Community Builder plugin that can be displayed as a tab on a user’s personal profile, so each user can have a separate calendar. The user just needs to enter the unique ID of the calendar in the plugin parameters in their profile. You can set a default calendar and time zone, and individual users can set their own time zones and calendars as well. This plugin comes with English and Dutch language files. Tested on Joomla 1.5.14 with Community Builder 1.2.1. It should work with or without legacy mode on. Should function in Joomla 1.0 too, though multilingual functionality probably will not work.
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