Joomlatools

Last week I spoke at the SEMforSMB conference in Austin, Texas. The conference was primarily focussed on search engine optimization and marketing for small and mid size businesses.

I did two talks, one about 'Building a business website in 3 minutes'. I showed how easy it is to setup a Joomla! 1.5 site, install a template and a component. All in I think it even took less then three minutes.

The second presentation was about how to search engine optimize your Joomla! 1.5 site. I co-presented this session together with Jay Moreno from redflamemedia. Jay specialises in Joomla! SEO and it was great to have an expert like him at my side to answers all the though questions.

While talking with people we learned that there still exist a lot of misconceptions about the fact that Joomla! has insufficent SEO features. At the conference I talked with many experts on issues like duplicate content, SEF URL's etc. All of them agreed that Joomla! 1.5 is a very SEO friendly CMS.

Don't believe me ? Well, let's take the Nooku.org site as an example. Nooku.org is getting a SEO score of 97% at domaintools.com and a an nice 84% on websitegrader.com Nooku.org isn't using any SEF or SEO plugins. Just a plain Joomla! 1.5 installation with Nooku installed. That's it.

For those of you interested in reading up on our SEO talk, here are the slides :

In recent months, the offical joomla.org site has undergone some major changes. Unfortunately, two extremely valuable resources have disappeared, and there aren't many signs that they're coming back in some way.

news.joomla.org

The new community.joomla.org was opened a little while ago, as a resource where all contributors of the Joomla project (documentors, moderators, developers, ...) have a blog to share information. That's a great initiative, but unfortunately the old news.joomla.org had to make way (it's available, but there are no links to it and it hasn't been updated for two months). This site was a place where anybody could post Joomla! related news. I always felt this was a great way of keeping an eye on what's going on in the community. Joomla!  is not only about the people who contribute directly to the project itself, but also about everybody else, be it (commercial or other) extension developers, template developers, professional integrators, book or tutorial authors, users, ... Certainly a place can be provided at community.joomla.org where everybody can post, making it a true community resource.

dev.joomla.org

More importantly, the old dev.joomla.org was replaced by docs.joomla.org and developer.joomla.org. Unfortunately a lot of valuable information is gone:

• The developer wiki is still available, but it is no longer reachable if you don't have the link. It contains a lot of documentation for developers, including some of my own contributions which I'd hate to get lost. Only a very small part has moved to docs.joomla.org, and is hard to find there.
• The old developer blogs were very actively posted on during the development of Joomla! 1.5. Whenever something new was introduced in the framework, it was posted there, along with how to use it and why it was the way it was. These old blog posts are no longer reachable.

Update

I removed the poll. The result was 90 votes in favor of bringing the sites back versus 9 votes against.

In the meantime, JoomlaConnect was released as a replacement for news.joomla.org. A lot of confusion could have been avoided by communicating about this in the open early on. The issues with the developer documentation is still unresolved as far as I'm aware.

It's been eight months since Johan posted the very first entry on the blog, and this one is already number 65. We noticed that every now and then, someone mentions one of our posts, reuses information, or translates an item for a local community site. Of course, we love that! To further encourage this, we decided to relicense all our posts under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (unless stated otherwise).

What does it mean? This license gives you a couple of freedoms:

• You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work
• You are free to remix or adapt the work (this includes translating it)

There are of course a couple of conditions, to make sure everybody plays fair:

• You must attribute the work to us, by adding 'Originally written by [AUTHOR] at [LINK TO ORIGINAL POST]
• You can't use our work for commercial purposes
• Whatever you do, your resulting must be licensed under the same license

You can read the full license or the short version at the Creative Commons site.

If you adapt, reuse or translate one of our posts, we'd love to hear about it! Just post a link in the comments of the original post. Not only will this help us to know what's happening with our posts, it will also point people who are interested to your site. I've collected some links below:

• Die grössten Joomla! Missverständnisse
• Anwendungen von RSS Feeds in Joomla! 1.5

• I falsi miti di Joomla
• Come usare i feed RSS di Joomla
• Downloads: Joomla 1.5 supera la versione 1.0

• Joomla! download stats
• Nooku, de nieuwe vertaaloplossing

• A Joomla! 1.5RC4 memóriahasználata és az örökölt mód

Last week, we finished our 10th milestone release of Nooku, the new translation manager for Joomla! 1.5. Just like with the prevoius releases, some of our partners are already using Nooku on their production sites. More on that soon on our Buzz page. This gives us the necessary feedback about 'real world usage' to make Nooku even better. There are still a couple of features we want to implement before we feel we are ready to release a beta version to a wider group of people, so you'll have to be a little more patient (or consider signing up to be a Nooku partner yourself and help us fund development!).

Ease of use

One of the features we've been working on is ease of use. We feel that managing a multilingual site shouldn't be any harder than managing a plain Joomla! site. First and foremost, we try to introduce as few technical terms as possible. As a developer, you're used to all kinds of concepts that are like Chinese to someone without a background in IT. Of course you need some terms, but whenever possible we try to limit them to words people are already familiar with from Joomla! and other software.

Making choices

Someone I demo'd Nooku to, remarked that 'it has so few features'. But options are not features. Half the time, when an application presents a user with a choice, you need a page of documentation to explain what that option does, and how it will affect your site. Five screens of configuration options might appear to give you a lot of control. In reality, only people who work with the software a lot (or who simply have too much time on their hands), will be able to use all those options.

Joomla! 1.5 already sets a good example on how to deal with this problem. By separating options into a Basic section and a hidden Advanced section, users know they don't need to worry about every single option. The advanced options have their recommended setting, and you only have to touch them if you want to achieve something special.

Getting rid of options

Nooku goes one step further. Whenever a choice needs to be made, we ask ourselves: 'Is this something the user has to decide?' Most of the time, the system has all the information it needs. So if the system is intelligent and analyzes its environment, it can make a better informed decision than an average user could. We're not compromising the power of the system: the choice is made dynamically, but by the system instead of the user. This is what the configuration screen currently looks like in Nooku:

Below are some myths and misconceptions about Joomla! you often read while browsing forums.

Joomla! is only for small sites

There are a lot of large Joomla! sites out there. In fact, some of the customers we do consultancy for, are building Joomla! sites for some well known multinational brands. Often these sites are customized beyond recognition, so there's no way of telling from the outside which software was used. There's also a good reason for keeping it that way: the less a potential hacker knows about your system, the better. So for critical sites, the developers go out of their way to hide the underlying technologies from their visitors. Finally, these developers are usually to busy to hang around in the forums.

Legacy mode is bad for your site

The legacy plugin is just a thin layer. It fools legacy extensions into thinking that they are running on Joomla! 1.0.x. Apart from that, it doesn't affect you system or other extensions, and hardly decreases memory use or performance at all. Some third party extension developers however use the fact that their extensions are 1.5 native as a marketing feature, creating the image that legacy mode is bad. This in turn has led some 3PD's to make fake-native extensions: these are in fact 1.0 extensions that don't require legacy mode, but include a copy of the legacy library in their own packages.

That being said, there are definitely benefits to using native extensions. But I'll use a mature, performant and secure legacy extension over a shabby native one any day of the week.

Joomla! has insufficient SEO

A site's SEO is what you make it, and no tool will do it for you. Search engine optimization is not black magic. Google and others try to find pages like a human would, so they also try to look at a site the way a human does. When you look at web page quickly, you will notice things like page titles, the URL, headings, ... When these contains words that describe the text, you'll already have a good idea of what it's about, without actually reading it. So well structured content will give you better page ranks than any tool ever will.

Again there's marketing involved: companies trying to sell you tools or services that will magically boost your ranking. For instance, the SEF URL's that Joomla! generates are more than adequate, as long as you pick your aliases sensibly (though admitted, they are less pretty than the ones some other tools generate).

Joomla! is for end users, not developers

When you're a web developer building a site for a customer, you'll be working on the project for a couple of months max. After that, end users will be maintaining the content for years to come. So a CMS's user friendliness should be your first concern. Just think of all the phone calls you'll get when your customer has trouble working with the system.

It's a history thing: Joomla 1.0 had a lot of messy code and often required hacks to get something done. And Joomla! has always had an active end user community, whereas projects like Drupal have attracted more developers early on, which has helped shape the whole notion of Drupal being more developer friendly.

In Joomla! 1.5 however, a lot -- everything! -- has changed for developers. Anyone who claims different clearly hasn't looked under the hood, ar at least not long enough to realize it's full potential. The new framework is very powerful and flexible, and allows you to build proper object oriented applications.