Two weeks ago we released Nooku 0.6 at the first Joomladay in Switzerland. The new 0.6 version focuses completely on SEO. With Nooku 0.5 we already had the basic translations features implemented, with the new 0.6 version we are pushing the envelope even further.
Today, if you want to create a multi-lingual search engine optimized Joomla website you need to install a multi-tude of different extensions (multi-lingual, search engine friendly URLs, metadata, etc...) . Nooku 0.6 solves all that out of the box... and makes it all translatable. Neat huh !
Alias validation
One of the features I'm personally very proud of is the new alias validation. Simply put Nooku 0.6 prevents duplicated aliases for all content items (articles, weblinks, categories, sections, banners, etc...). It is also capable of correctly converting (transliterating) a title into an alias on the fly for almost any language.
Nooku 0.6 needed alias validation to allow us to remove the numeric information from the URL's. For example, if two article aliases are identical Joomla will not know what article to show if you remove the numeric information (the article id). Other SEF extensions solve this by storing the URL in the database, this approach requires extra queries and greatly reduces the performances of your site, in some case up to more then 25%.
In our solution the alias validation happens on the fly in the actual edit screen you are working in. Just like with the translation there are no extra plugins to install, or settings to set, it just works. It seems a very trivial feature but we are really pushing Joomla 1.5 to it's limits on this one.
To give you an idea, the validation is a combination of an ajax driven (mootools) server-side form validation solution in combination with a new and more powerful event system we created as part of the Nooku Framework. Like everything we build we try it to be extendible and reusable. By abstracting the alias validation from it's implementation we allow third party developers to easily use it in their own extensions with only a couple of lines of code. The same also applies for the new metadata support we added to the menu manager, but that's a story for another blog post.
