Archive for June, 2008
I took the opportunity this week to revisit one of my most popular podcasts on Joomla! Juice!, by contacting Joomla! guru Chris Szabo. Chris, who owns Navega Bem Web Design, lives on the idyllic sub-tropical Portuguese island of Madeira. In this video, I talk to Chris about his adoption of Joomla! 1.5, e-commerce and real estate implementations of Joomla! 1.5.
High Resolution Flash here. You can receive further podcasts and videocasts automatically through iTunes by subscribing here. Note: we’ve re-optimised the source video due to some audio issues.
I’m a big fan of using feed aggregators, more specifically Google Reader. If you’ve never tried it, you really should. Instead of keeping a list of bookmarks to favourite sites and checking them regularly for new content, I add them to the reader. It also allows me to manage what I’ve read, what I want to tag for later, what I want to share… I hardly browse the web anymore. When I visit a site I find interesting, or a product I want to be informed about, I just use the feed. When it doesn’t have one, or it’s not working, I don’t bother. So before reading on, check if you’re site has proper feeds — you could be losing part of your audience!
It’s even more frustrating when I see a Joomla! 1.5 site that doesn’t have proper feeds. J!1.5 makes it so easy, and still some people manage to mess it up. By default, when you make a new menu item to a category, a section or a frontpage, the ‘Show a feed link’ option in the Advanced parameters box is turned on. The new page you created will have a feed icon in the address bar in most modern browsers. By clicking that, you get a choice of RSS and Atom feeds to subscribe to.
It gets better: When you turn on ‘Search Engine Friendly URLs’ in the global configuration, as well as ‘Add Suffix to URLs’, a URL to a section or category view will look something like this: http://example.com/my_alias.html (or http://example.com/index.php/my_alias.html if you’re not using mod_rewrite). Now change the .html suffix to .feed, as in http://example.com/my_alias.feed.
Instant gratification! (The same principle applies to articles, try changing the .html suffix of an article view URL to .pdf).
The next step is to use some of the web services out there to add some extra power to your feeds. RSS and Atom, the most popular feed file formats, allow for great flexibility. One cool service is Feedburner. It allows you to optimize your feed, publish it to other services, track the usage, … Another one I can definitely recommend is Yahoo Pipes. It has a graphical interface that lets you mash up, sort, filter, and even translate your feeds.
What these and other services have in common, is that they generate a new url for the resulting feed. Your users will need to use that feed, else they’re bypassing all the cool features you added. A simple solution (though arguably not very flexible) is to insert the new feed link in the <head> tag of your Joomla! template. This will make the same link appear on every page. Of course you also need to turn of the ‘Show Feed Links’ option I mentioned earlier.
All of this might sound a little abstract, so I drew up a little schema of how we do it on nooku.org. Hopefully this gives you some ideas to start exploring.
Our friends at Packt have announced their 2008 Open Source Content Management System Awards. As you may know, Joomla! has performed extremely well in previous years, taking out several prestigious awards. Nominations open on July 14.
Last year, Joomla! took out the “Best Open Source PHP CMS”. Drupal won the overall award. However, last year Joomla’s fabulous 1.5 version was still in beta and not necessarily on the judge’s radar. The new framework could very well take J! over the line for 2008.
Packt says: “The format for the 2008 Award remains the same, with the addition of a new category, which will replace Open Source Social Networking. This exciting new category is for MVPs at Open Source Content Management Systems. This will recognise the contributions to projects made by individuals that often go unnoticed. For the large majority of Open Source projects, it is the tireless contributions from enthusiastic individuals that enable its growth and adoption and these are the people that Packt feels is necessary to identify. MVPs will be nominated by their projects and will be announced during the final week, with features on the MVPs for the Content Management Systems that won their categories.”
The full timetable is as follows:
For full details of the 2008 Open Source CMS Award, please visit the website: www.PacktPub.com/Award
The prize fund for the Award remains at a total of $20,000. The money from the Social Networking Award will be distributed to the Best PHP and Best Other CMS categories, with the projects finishing in second and third collecting $500.
Keep your eyes on the Packt site and make sure you vote!
