Brian's writings in the category Joomla
Every day I read and hear a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEF (Search Engine Friendly) urls.
For me the number one question is "are the urls HEF (Human Ear Friendly)?"
Of course he does. If he still has time to use the net then it's a fairly safe bet that at some point he will visit a joomla powered web site.
With Joomla being used by the UN, National Governments, leading NPO's and US Senators and Governors he surely must.
But that isn't what this blog post is really all about or why there is a photo of lion accompanying this blog post.
Wow has it really been four years since Peter Russell and I sat down and wrote the press release that announced the birth of Joomla!.
So much has changed since then and yet so much is still the same.
Happy Birthday and congratulations to everyone who was there on that day, September 1st 2005.
In 2006 Johan and myself celebrated the first bithday with a cake and a candle at the first Joomla!Day in the UK.
Will you be celebrating today or perhaps having a JUG (Joomla User Group) party?
(I really should consign that photo to the trash - it was certainly a bad hair day. )
This holiday weekend I had an enlightening conversation with a large company, that had been a training client of mine.
They got stuck on a little joomla issue with extension XXXX and just couldn't work out the problem or find the solution.
This client is pretty tech savvy and had followed most of the advice I gave in the training class.
When I started this blog I was not going to have any comments system at all. "Agree or disagree... I don't care" didn't really make sense if I let you comment but I was convinced otherwise.
The problem was, that I had never really found a joomla comment system that I liked. (Note I have never looked at closed source systems, or would I, so don't start telling me that product xxx does the job)
Many years ago, when I was young and innocent, I lived in a self-sufficient "closed" community but now that I am older, and more mature (?), it is more accurate to say that today I chose to "participate" or "belong" to several different communities.
In the world of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) the word "community" is used as a badge, often without any true understanding of what the word really means.
Joomla, like many F/LOSS projects, claims to be a community project but have you thought what that really means?
I received the following email last week
"Should we stall new clients until 1.6 is released, or build their sites on 1.5 knowing there will be some future re-work to migrate them to 1.6? Maybe we should build now on 1.5 and leave them on 1.5?"
As I was writing a reply I realised that it might be better to appear here on the blog for others to read (and perhaps even comment).
Whilst looking through the list of high traffic joomla sites at joomla.me I was disappointed, but not surprised to see that many of them were warez sites offering links to rapidshare, hotfile, megaupload etc.
Not all of these are offering joomla warez but almost every day a new warez site pops up on my google alert offering me the latest and greatest Joomla extensions and templates.
Is it worth the effort trying to close these sites down? At best all that you will really be able to achieve is to get the hosting account closed down and they will spring back up again in a few days.
If your work is being offered on these warez sites then take it as a compliment and a free advert that someone is ripping of your work and move along. I know I did.
How many joomla sites are there in the world? Or perhaps of more interest what percentage of successful web sites are created with joomla? And what are the Top 10 joomla sites.
The number of downloads of joomla is interesting but it doesn't really give a true figure of installations, especialy as you could use one download 100 times or just install it directly from your host.
The only way to tell is to actually sit down and count them all.
Congratulations, you discovered a hidden secret!