This is a guest blog post by Samantha Bovat

Where do I begin…

There are so many reasons to have quality content on your website and your reputation is #1. Without a clear and effective message, you will lose visitors.

Take a step back and really look at your website’s home page. Just the home page. What do you see? If you landed here inadvertently- would you know what the business or service is that the owner is providing. Are you the intended audience for such services? If you are a potential client, do you know what to do next?

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Today I got one of those client emails we all dread. The client had visited his brand new site and it wouldn't load it just gave a blank screen.

Experienced web developers know that a blank screen is really an error message so I dug a little further and checked his site with my ftp client. Not surprisingly I saw that some malicious code had been inserted into the index.php files. Fortunately there was a bug in this code and that gave the blank screen.

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Now that might seem like a strange thing to say but if you don't fail at some things then it means that "you are not trying hard enough".

If we always take the "safe" option that has guaranteed success then we will never truly move on and progress.

When I started this blog, and it took a lot of convincing to do it, I took a decision that this blog would not be the usual Joomla blog.

My intention is to write articles that are of interest to a wide audience and to not only provide "tips and tricks" and republished "product news" but also to write articles that are "challenging and make you really think".

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I had intended on writing a long blog post with screenshots and everything explaining some of the new features, and changes, in the upcoming Joomla 1.6.

But I'm lazy and I don't see any point in re-inventing the wheel so just take a few moments to read this excellent presentation from Andrew Eddie.

I'm still not convinced that the core of Joomla needs the bloat of tags and comments but only time will tell on that one. (I originaly came to mambo because I was looking for an open source application to build dynamic web sites that did NOT have comments)

Name
J. Arnold Wender.

On-Line name (Skype:Twitter:Joomla forums)
Skype - arnoldwender
Twitter - @arnoldwender
Joomla! - no longer active

Website
Wender & Wender - www.wender.com.mx
Joomla! Tutorials - www.joomlamania.org

Location
Halle Saale, Germany

Job
Webdeveloper & SEO Consultant

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Is there an extension that you regularly use and regularly modify (hack)? If you're anything like me then I'm confident that you have found a joomla extension that is just perfect for a site but just needed a little tweaking.

When I mentioned this to several people during Joomla!Day many people came back with the same answer, "Oh yes I always use XXXX but each time they release an update I have to re-apply my fixes".

That's a pain in the proverbial butt, of course, and yet not one of the people I spoke to had actually passed on their "fixes" to the extension developer.

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When a new (security) release of joomla is released how do you do the update?

Do you actually look at the changes or do you blindly do an update either via ftp or using an automated "update extension"

Blindly updating your site is not good security!!!

What? Is Brian saying that we shouldn't keep our joomla sites up to date. Absolutely not.

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Welcome to the "Joomla Developers Showdown".

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves the creation of a Joomla 1.5 component called "Company Directory". You may develop this extension on your own or as part of a team select, but it is essential that component is delivered to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it before 09:00 GMT on 6 July.

This component should satisfy the needs of "Impossible Missions Force (IMF)".

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Name
Jennifer Marriott

On-Line name (Skype:Twitter:Joomla forums)
Twitter: @jennifermarriot
Joomla forums: Jenny

Website
www.marpomultimedia.com and www.jennifermarriott.com

Location
Oklahoma, USA

Job
Web Developer/Designer and Musician

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