Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Farewell to Joomla! 2.5

December 31, 2014 is the last day of Joomla 2.5. It is the official End of Life for this version.
Though 2.5 may have had what felt like a rushed lifetime, in many ways it leaves behind its own legacy. It helped the project to demonstrate its ability to grow quickly and produce a stable product along the way, and in many ways has served as an effective bridge between two releases which will have truly lengthy lifetimes with focuses on long term support and stability.
If you are running an earlier release of the current version (for example, you are running 2.5.1 and the current version is 2.5.6), you should upgrade to the current version. Each minor release fixes a number of bugs and/or security issues. It is always good practice to upgrade to the latest maintenance version as a first step in troubleshooting a problem and fixing any newly discovered security issues.
Download the latest Joomla version or call me for help at 613-231-6308.
You can also request assistance from our website at http://joomlabliss.com.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Recovering from Google’s Panda and Penguin

If your site got hit but the Google’s animal squat team, then you might be interested in this post. 

In the period from early February to May of 2013 Google rolled out several updates to its search engine ranking system, of which the two major – and most vicious ones – were called Panda and Penguin, occurring in April and May of 2013 respectively.

Before that, for the past three years, our main website Joomla Bliss was consistently ranked on the first page, among the first five links, for our main keywords: “website design Ottawa”, “webdesign Ottawa” as well as “Joomla website design” on Google.ca

And this positioning accounted for 85% of SEO and website marketing we did for our business. We were quite happy and proud that our marketing expenditures were minimal and yet our business was doing well.

Well, all this was ended by Panda and Penguin. I am terrified to think what Zebra might do to us, if it ever gets released.

We are now on our way to recovery, noticed some positive changes already. Hopefully, this will continue. So this post is to share with other small businesses that got crippled by Google’s animals on how to recover from the hit.

Before I summarize the steps we have taken to recover our rating, let me just say that Google’s official position is that it has changed its algorithm in order to reward sites with high quality content and downgrade (penalize) websites with low quality content. By “low” quality Google usually means “borrowed” or “partially borrowed” content as well as "overly optimized" content, i.e. stuffed with too many keywords per unit of text. 

Well, our site’s content was written by us from scratch, we got very good feedback on its content from clients (one of them said that before hiring us she read every single FAQ and Blog post on the site). So Panda/Penguin would not have hit us for this reason.

In terms of keyword stuffing – well, in the past, Google worked in such a way so that if you pepper your main keywords in all structural elements of your site as well as on each page’s content – you got higher ranking. We did have a lot of our keywords everywhere, so we figured we probably got into the "keyword stuffing" category.

So, did Google change its own rules and penalized the sites who followed those rules (albeit unspoken but nonetheless actionable!) in the past? Hmm..

We conducted some research, listened to video announcements by Matt Cutts, Google’s official SEO spokesperson, read articles like this one regarding SEO recovery from Panda/Penquin updates, tried and tweaked things on the site – and in the end came up with these observations:
  1. Used iJoomlaSEO and decided to optimize our meta tags by including more of our keywords – our site went down by several links in the next few days  (this was in February)
  2. Contacted Google’s support from inside our Google webmaster account and received a reply that there was no manual penalty imposed on our site (which confirmed that did nothing illegal)
  3. Simplified our site’s structure by removing a 3rd level in the main menu hierarchy and adding more items to the 1st and 2nd levels – moved a couple of links up, not a significant change
  4. Use iJoomlaSEO to de-optimize our site by re-phrasing description META tags and removing some of the keywords (and even removing a lot of them!) from each tag; de-optimized all Page Title tags and Alias tags  – the site went up 7 links within two days, i.e. a significant change. Note that we did not remove ALL keywords, we left at least one set in each description, but we used to have more than one (so this is where the keyword stuffing comes in)
  5. Analyzed our keywords presented inside Google webmaster account, made changes to the site, ensured that the keyword list generated by Google reflects our site’s specialization and  finally achieved a prioritized list that does correspond to our site's content – no noticeable change in positioning
  6. Acquired 3-4 links from design websites and software-related blogs – site moved up a couple of links, i.e. need to acquire more of such quality links, i.e. related to web design
  7. Acquired Social Media likes and Google Pluses and Tweets from local Ottawa contacts – site moved up (especially after someone added comments to their "likes" that happened to have our target keywords in them)
  8. Posted new blog post weekly or bi-weekly, each post being a long article with the "authorship" information enabled, some strong formatting styles, tag cloud, and some images) – site moved up. 
  9. Upgraded our CMS version from the obsolete Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 3.0 (having received Google’s notification into our webmaster account that “new software is available”) – the site went up 1 link
  10. After the upgrade, some of the social media button counts got lost due to certain changes in the URLs (we removed Joomla IDs from the URLs, whereas the twitter counts and some other counts were tied to those and some of them got lost) - the site went down by 3 links. If you have a lot of social media likes and doing a CMS upgrade, ensure ways to preserve those counts! 


Overall, in the course of several weeks, we moved up from being on the links 36-39 to 22-23 for our three main keywords: “website design Ottawa”, “webdesign Ottawa” as well as “Joomla website design” on Google.ca. This is still a far cry from being on the first page among the first 3-5 links as before, but it is progress.

SUMMARY: HOW TO RECOVER FROM GOOGLE'S PANDA AND PENGUIN HIT.

I tried to list the steps in the order of priority:
  1. Add more content to your website every week, post long blog articles with images and some custom formatting and add links to other reputable resources related to your field
  2. Acquire more social media "likes" and "shares"and "tweets" and "Google pluses" with sharing comments that contain your target keywords (ideally), and 
  3. De-optimize your site if you used to follow old SEO standards: leave ONE set of keywords per Page Title tag and META description tag. If you are using Joomla, do NOT manually alter the alias tag to make it slightly different from the Page Title tag. Although we can't prove, we suspect that this matters too.
  4. Clean up your site's content by removing or merging short pages into long ones. Make sure the content is perceived as authentic (add Google authorship). If you are using Joomla, learn how to enable Google authorship on a Joomla site, you'd need to add some code.
  5. Acquire back links from related websites and try to get your keywords as an anchor text.
If someone noticed other things that were proven to work for Panda and Penguin recovery, do let me know! Contact me via our Ottawa web design firm Joomla Bliss or via this blog.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

New Joomla Version: Upgrade or Not to Upgrade

This is the question we hear from most of our existing and prospective clients: should we upgrade and when should we upgrade our site to a new Joomla version?

As with any software, a new release often has bugs in it and it takes a couple of months to get it stabilized. In addition, it takes time for the Joomla website development community to upgrade existing extensions. There are over 6000 Joomla extensions! Granted, the most reputable and popular Joomla extensions do upgrade quickly, but this is software, and designers are only human, so mistakes always happen, bugs are always present, so it is wise to wait until the newly released version gets stabilized. 

However, it is perfectly safe to upgrade to a new sub-version.

With all that said, my website design firm in Ottawa uses Joomla 1.5 version on our site, which we loaded with a layer of security, and it seems to be doing quite well, over three years already (touch wood). The reason we will have to upgrade to a new Joomla version is because of the extensions and components: soon it will be hard to find specialized components that support Joomla 1.5 .

In other words, if you have a good security layer installed on your site and if your hosting is reliable, you don't need to upgrade to every subsequent version of Joomla. Every 2-3 years should be sufficient. Just keep in mind that installing new components creates potentially a new security vulnerability. But if you don't plan on installing anything new after you've released the site, then staying with your version for 2-3 years, provided you have some additional security in place, like OSE Security component (get the pro option), for example, should work just fine for 85% of all websites.

If you need any help, contact me via this Ottawa Joomla blog or via my Ottawa website design company Joomla Bliss.



Monday, March 4, 2013

What You Need to Know about New Twitter API


Twitter is phasing out their old API starting March 2013..bugger!

If you currently have a twitter module installed on your Joomla website, you will need to do a few things:

  1. Log into the Twitter developer portal with your account login
  2. Create new "App" with twitter username and the website URL intended to display tweets
  3. Submit info and password, private key, etc. a bunch of authentication passwords
  4. Apply those in your Joomla twitter module, and you should be all set.
And if you need any help, do not hesitate to contact me via my website design Ottawa site.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Mobile Application Versus Mobile Website: What's in the Name

The terms "mobile application" and "mobile website" have become so widely used that some people get confused about the difference between the two. Interestingly the confusion is less when you say "mobile app" as opposed to "mobile application".

If you are not a techie person I can see how the two can can be confusing. Let me try and give an explanation without using too many words.

The main difference is that the mobile application is a piece of software you download from a store into your phone or other mobile device and then periodically download upgrades to it. But you "carry" it inside your phone. A mobile website is just a website that has been optimized to look good on mobile devices. You can access it from the regular or "desktop" browser as well as from a browser installed on your phone.

I wrote earlier that Google calls websites that have been optimized for mobile devices "responsive" websites. Google also does not recommend having a separate website setup specifically for mobile devices. For example, you can have a website that is "www.ottawawebdesign.com"  and there will be a mobile-friendly version of it "www.m.ottawawebdesign.com". Google does not recommend this. Instead, you are advised to use ONE website and implement CSS media queries to ensure that when someone access your site via a mobile device, they get a proper display. This has been our strategy all along so I can't complain about Google in this respect.

Also, mobile apps are usually designed to do something specific, like a calendar or weather updates whereas a website can be very general in nature.

Most recent website templates provided by reputable template design houses like Joomlart or Rockettheme are "responsive" by default. Some contain small bugs and need minor adjustments here and there but overall most recent templates are of very high quality and highly "responsive".

Hope this makes sense folks, but as usual, if you need help, contact me via my web design Ottawa website.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Commercial Joomla Components Worth Buying

In web design you can't grow your own potatoes all the time, so you need to use out-of-the-box components if you want to build large sites quickly. As it often happens with software, commercial components are not necessarily better than those you can get for free. Commercial components tend to have more bells and whistles but they also have more bugs and often have more conflicts with other software. But there are some excellent commercial Joomla components.

Here is a list of Joomla components we think are worth paying for:
  1. JomSocial
  2. Job Board by Joomlart
  3. JoomSport
  4. AcyMailing
  5. Docman
  6. Gtranslate Pro
  7. Breezing Forms
  8. Akeeba Backup
  9. Akeeba Security
  10. OSE Security
  11. OSE Membership
  12. Flexicontent
I can probably add 3-4 more Joomla components to this list, but the ones above cover 80% of all websites you would be building as a web designer on a daily basis, at least this has been my experience so far at our Ottawa web design firm Joomla Bliss.

As always, if you need any help, contact me via this Ottawa Joomla blog or via my Ottawa web design site.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Mobile Websites: What's the Best Way to Optimize a Website

We've had a lot of client inquiries recently about "mobile websites". Clients want to make sure that their websites look neat and sweet on all mobile devices, and we feel that it is a MUST for contemporary web design.

There are number of ways to ensure that a website looks nice and proper on mobile devices, but we prefer to listen to uncle Google. And here is what uncle Google recommends:

Details of recommendations

Google calls mobile websites "responsive websites" and supports smartphone-optimized sites in three configurations:
  1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google's recommended configuration.
  2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
  3. Sites that have separate mobile and desktop URLs.
In other words, instead of setting up a separate subdomain with "m.mysite.com" - follow Google's guidelines on how to use CSS media queries to optimize your website's code for mobile devices. You will have only one website but it will look different on desktop browsers and mobile devices browsers.

In fact, Google's recommendation has been our preference right form the start, but some clients feel it is a fancier way to have a separate website which will be optimized specifically for mobile devices. Well, when you take into consideration that you would need to maintain this separate website separately, this option becomes less attractive. But once you put Google's weight behind your advice then clients usually accept it without hesitation.

And if you need my help, contact me via my Ottawa website design site.


Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Joomla Security: Simple Fix to Help You Sleep at Night

There has been a lot of hacking activities going on recently - for all types of websites, including Joomla websites.

There is a couple of steps one can take to protect a Joomla site and enhance its security:
  1. Take regular backups and store them offline.
  2. Purchase Akeeba security subscription for EUR85 and install it. Akeeba allows you to take backups in seconds and store them off-line with meaningful and descriptive file names. Joy to use.
  3. Purchase OSE security component , note that to install it and use it you will need FTP access. What's sweet is this component is platform independent, you can use it on any site, not only on Joomla websites. It is $160 CDN.
Both Akeeba and OSE allow installation on unlimited domains. Both will enable double authentication: you will have two login screens one after another.

In addition, do not use "admin" for user names and "yourcompany1234" for passwords, and use a different set of logins for each authentication screen.

Overall, these two components overlap in some coverage, but OSE is more comprehensive, as it is installed at a server level. As a web designer, you would want to acquire both. 

Be familiar with your hosting environment. Check with your hosting company and ask them how long their logs are kept. You need an apache log for at least 7 days (the more the better!). Ask them about their backup policies. This is why I don't recommend re-seller hosting companies. They usually don't do any backups and don't keep logs for more than two days. Hostgator is not a reseller; we have been using them for over three years and we are happy with things. Hostpappa is a reseller through and though; I do not recommend them, their service is terrible.

That's it from me today, if you need help, contact me via my website design Ottawa site.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Really Speeding up Joomla

This article is a free translation of the Russian blog post from here: http://alexandr.sysoev.ru/node/168

How to Speed up Joomla at the Core

Typical measures to speed up Joomla: turn on cash, install PHP accelerator, you will optimize and and maybe get 20 requests per second.

But then what, change the CMS? In my experience users who swtich often ask to come back to Joomla.

Just to mention, this article does not discuss the choice of CMS, the speed of the various CMS solutions or architectural flaws of Joomla.

These recommendations will be helpful if it is not enough for you to get 20 requests per second, you need 2000-3000.

Joomla runs on PHP, so even if you use caching at the level of modules, Joomla still uses PHP and is rendering the page each time. This means that the rate of 2000 requests per second would be unattainable. So what we are going to do is to to make Joomla keep a copy of the generated pages to disk, and Apache to read the copy directly, bypassing the PHP for all subsequent users. This is a good old approach, which incidentally can be applied to other CMS, but only for static content. For Joomla we are using Article, which is just a page with static content.

So lets create a new plugin for Joomla, just two files:

HERE IS THE CODE:


defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );
jimport( 'joomla.plugin.plugin' );
class plgSystemHtmlcache extends JPlugin
{
function plgSystemHtmlcache(& $subject, $config)
{
parent::__construct($subject, $config);
}

function onAfterRender()
{
global $mainframe;
if($mainframe->isAdmin()) { return; } //do not cache admin pages

$document =& JFactory::getDocument();
$doctype = $document->getType();
$user =& JFactory::getUser();
if($user->get('guest') != 1) { return; } //Only cache for non logged in users
if ( $doctype != 'html' ) { return; } // Only render for HTML output
$html_cache_dir=$this->param('html_cache_dir');
if($html_cache_dir=='') { return; } //Exit if no html_cache_dir specified
if(!file_exists($html_cache_dir)) { mkdir($html_cache_dir); } //try to create folder if it does not exist
// Only render for provided views
if ((JRequest :: getVar('view')) != $this->param('cache_view_1') &&
(JRequest :: getVar('view')) != $this->param('cache_view_2') &&
(JRequest :: getVar('view')) != $this->param('cache_view_3') &&
(JRequest :: getVar('view')) != $this->param('cache_view_4')) { return; }
$relativePath=$this->request_uri();
if (strpos($relativePath, '.')) { return; } //exit if found DOT in the request_uri, we do not want to cache anything other than SEO
$relativePath=str_replace('/',DS,$relativePath);
//$body = Minify_HTML::minify(JResponse::getBody());
$body =JResponse::getBody();
$fullPath=$html_cache_dir.$relativePath;
$parts=explode(DS,$relativePath);
$currentPath=$html_cache_dir.DS;

foreach( $parts as $p){
if($p==''){
continue;
}
$currentPath.=$p;
if((!file_exists($currentPath))&&(!is_file($currentPath))){
mkdir($currentPath);
}
$currentPath.=DS;
}//end for each
$indexFile=$currentPath.DS.'index.html';
if(!file_exists($indexFile)){ $this->writeToFile($indexFile,$body); }
}

function writeToFile($fileName,$content){
$handle=fopen($fileName,'w');
fwrite($handle,$content);
fclose($handle);
}

function request_uri(){
if (isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])){
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
}else{
if (isset($_SERVER['argv'])){
$uri = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] .'?'. $_SERVER['argv'][];
}else{
$uri = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] .'?'. $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
}
}
return $uri;
}

function param($name){
static $plugin,$pluginParams;
if (!isset( $plugin )){
$plugin =& JPluginHelper::getPlugin('system', 'htmlcache');
$pluginParams = new JParameter( $plugin->params );
}
return $pluginParams->get($name);
}
}
Now lets create an event handler onAfterRender. The main task of the task handler to intercept only articles of the "Article" type, to create the directory structure of folders html_cache_dir in accordance with the structure of the website and to place/save page's content in there.


In addition, before saving, you can run the page via the HTML optimizer (for example, this Minify_HTML (http://code.google.com/p/minify/source/browse/trunk/min/lib/Minify/HTML.php)), which optimizes the size of the page by removing unnecessary comments and spaces, thereby increasing the efficiency of the website.


As a separate remark, we note that this code works for websites with SEO enabled and does not cache the pages with any extensions such as php or html. Those that will be cashed are URLs of the type:
/ about
/ software / catalog


The code will have to be tweaked if you are not using SEO.


htmlcache.php - directly to the code.


Both files can be uploaded to the / plugins / system or put in htmlcache.zip and installed via the administrative interface of Joomla. After installation, set this: html_cache_dir = / opt / www / html / cache / content in the plugin settings and turn on the plugin (Enabled: Yes).
When first accessing the page in the directory / opt / www / html / cache / you should see that content is available in those folders and files - this means that the plugin is working fine and that all write permissions are fine.


What is left to do is to force Apache to give these files without contacting the PHP code. In. Htaccess, right after the RewriteEngine on to add:
RewriteCond% {REQUEST_URI} (/ | / [^.] *) $ [NC]
RewriteCond% {DOCUMENT_ROOT} / cache / content /% {REQUEST_URI} / index.html-f
RewriteRule (. *) / Cache / html / $ 1/index.html [L]


Restart apache and test the browser. In order to verify the performance run (under Linux):
ab-n 10000-c 50-k www.azati.com/
...
Concurrency Level: 50
Time taken for tests: 4.294054 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 10000
Total transferred: 71155755 bytes
HTML transferred: 67695750 bytes
Requests per second: 2328.80 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 21.470 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.429 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 16182.38 [Kbytes/sec] received
...
It is better to run the test a few times to ensure the "warm-up" for Apache. Can be run on the different for each.


Replace "www.azati.com" with the address of your server, www.azati.com can be tested for comparison. Do not fear, the site does not crush and Google statistics are not coreupted.

Unfortunately, the speed does not come for free:
  1. We lose the ability to edit articles (Articles) through the Joomla front-end with the help of special plugins, we can do so only through the administrative interface (i.e. the standard Joomla ability).
  2. After editing the article, you must clear the cache via the administrative interface Tools -> Clean cache.
Weigh all factors and decide whether this approach is justified for your website.


P.S. If you have dynamic content, you can arrange a periodic cleaning of the cache (e.g. every hour), and hence get a fast site that is also frequently updated.


SOURCE: http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/personal/92783/  



The key is, if you change the cotent on your website, you must clear Joomla cache. Otherwise, the new content will not be displayed. If you're going to use this method, this must be made clear to the customer.

To order a website from us, go to our web design Ottawa site, this year we focus on website design Ottawa for medium businesses and non-profit organizations.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Joomla 2.5.1 Released: I am Sold

I am sold, but my question is what happened to all the numbers in between version 1.7.5 and 2.5.1? I know Joomla is now on a new development cycle, popping out a new "puppy" every 6 months, but why 2.5? 


I was not impressed with Joomla 1.7, but I did like Joomla 2.5, haven't had a chance to investigate it very carefully, but what I saw upon a quick, I did like.

With all that said, we will use Joomla 2.5.1 with caution, only for small projects at first. We'll wait for all the extensions to catch up. .

Our main search terms are: web design Ottawa and website design Ottawa.

For SEO help, please contact us via my wife's SEO Ottawa website.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Caching Issue with Rockettheme's Template

We recently released a site using Rockettheme's Nebulae template. The template is very sleek, we loved it, and the client loved the end result http://www.galleriadesign.ca/.

To speed up the site, we installed caching, and that corrupted the interface in certain browsers. Searching on Rockettheme's forum did confirm that there, in fact, a clash between many of Rockettheme's templates' elements and Joomla caching. In fact, there are clashing issues with many 3rd party modules and components. We disabled caching on everything, including individual modules. This did produce good results until we noticed that once you try to access the site from a mobile device, the interface got messed up again.

The solution was to disable the "iPhone custom css" option in the Gantry of the template. Together with disabling all cache, this solved the Nebulae issues.

Rockettheme has a reputation for sleek designs and poor coding. Confirmed.

On the plus side, we finally got on the 1st page on Google.ca for our two main keywords: website design Ottawa and web design Ottawa.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Multilingual Support in Joomla 1.7

Below is a simple step-by-step summary of how to enable multilingual feature in Joomla 1.7:
  1. Login to your website, from the Control panel go to Extensions > Extension Manager 
  2. Install a Language pack. You need a separate language pack for each language. Download language packs from here:
  3. After you’ve installed the required language pack(s), go to Extensions > Language Manager
  4. In Language Manager, select the Content tab, create a new item corresponding to the language you’ve installed.
  5. From the main Control panel, go to Menus and create a New Menu for the required language (or, if the second-language menu has already been created, create a Mew Menu Item for this language menu). You need a separate menu for each language, and they will all be listed under Menus.
  6. This step is very important! After you’ve created the second (third, forth, etc.) language menu items, you need to associate them with one another.
  7. NOTE: Joomla has one Home page by default. If you are adding another language, you need to create a corresponding Home page for that language.
  8. To add Articles in various languages, simply go to Article ManagerAdd New Item, and specify the language. Connect it with the corresponding Menu item in the same language, as usual. Define Alias contents manually, if you wish. Add meta data, keywords, etc.

For more details, check out this batch tutorials on how to get Joomla 1.7 multilingual.  

If you need need a Joomla website, contact me via my Joomla Ottawa site.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Joomla Extensions: MMPortfolio

We recently installed a commercial Joomla extension MMPortfolio. You can see it on our Ottawa website, About > Portfolio.

It is a nice component, but it takes some tweaking to get the display the way you want it. And the 'readmore' button is hardcoded, you can't move it down easily. We had to descrease the size of the font and the amount of text to get it to display properly. There are a couple of other things that don't work well, but the button is the main one. But after some tweaking we got it going and it look good now I think.

We also provide an alternative dispay of our web design portofiio as an accordion and a cube, some very neat tool you get with Joomla.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Today's Joomla Tip: Fixing capitalization on Joomla standard contact form

The standard contact form in Joomla is probably used most frequently by many Joomla designers, mostly becuase it is so convenient and it is already there! But have you ever noticed the capitalization for certain fields are a little flaky? For example:

Enter your Name:
Email Address:
Message subject:

In other words, there is no consistency in the capitalization of words. It's pretty straightforward to fix.

First I'd recommend that you install the component eXtplorer, to make navigating the file structure easy. Then go to the folder components > com_contact > views > contact > tmpl.

If you need more help, contact me via our website design Ottawa website

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Today's Joomla Tip: Porting sites with JoomlaPack

Moving a new Joomla site from development to a production server can be a tedious and frustrating task at best. I've done this quite a few times before I descovered JoomlaPack.

This is a Joomla based component designed to backup and restore your website, but it can also be used to port your website to a different server... in minutes!

Backing up your site:
After you've downloaded the component from http://joomlapack.net/ and installed it on your website, click on Components -> JoomlaPack-> Configuration. Under Basic in Common Settings, set the Output Directory to the root of your website, or better yet, one folder level above the root of your site.

Under Advanced in Profile Settings, you can leave all the default settings. However, depending on your destination server, you may have trouble restoring your backup. To ensure maximum compatibility, change the Archiver Engine to "Zip, using PHP functions" and change the "File List" engine to "Pure PHP File System Scanner". If your backup process seems to hang, you can also change "Backup Method" to "Javascript Redirects".

Click the "Backup Now" link. Once the backup is complete, go to "Administrator Backup Files". Select your most recent backup and click "Download" to pull the backup file to your local machine.

Restoring, Porting your site:
DO NOT INSTALL Joomla on your destination web space. Simply upload the backup file to this space along with the file Kickstart.php (included in the JoomlaPack installation file archive). Be sure to create a MySQL database to support the new Joomla site and assign an appropriate database user to it.

Next, open your browser and go to the Kickstart file on your new site, i.e., http://myNewDomain.com/kickstart.php

Follow the onscreen directions , and voila! Don't forget to remove the installation folder after you're done.

If you need a Joomla website, Joomla Bliss Ottawa is the website design shop in Ottawa I co-own with my wife.

If you need SEO, my wife runs an SEO Ottawa consultancy. We'll be happy to help you.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Fixing capitalization on Joomla standard contact form.

The standard contact form in Joomla is used very frequently by most Joomla designers because it is so convenient, and it is already there! But have you ever noticed that the capitalization is a little flaky? For example:

Enter your Name:
Email address:
Message Subject:

In other words, there is no consitency in the capitalization of these labels. Fixing this is pretty straightforward.

First I would recommend that you install the component eXtplorer for easy navigation of the file structure. The, go to the folder components > com_contact > views > contact > tmpl and edit the file "default_form.php".

You'll notice that the text in question is wrapped around the function call JText::_. Simply remove the function call and edit the label text to display as you prefer. Then save the file. That's it!

IMPORTANT: This does not work with the Joom Fish component. It cases Joomlfish to stop working on the Contact form, i.e. no translation available.

If you need a Joomla website, Joomla Bliss Ottawa is the website design shop in Ottawa I co-own with my wife.

If you need SEO, my wife runs an SEO Ottawa consultancy. We'll be happy to help you.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Today's Joomla Tip: 404 Errors and mod_rewrite

Here's another tidbit about Apache servers and .htaccess.

Usually porting a Joomla site goes fairly smooth, but once in a while, for various reasons, there is trouble when turning on mod_rewrite for SEF. Usually it's a problem with the .htaccess file, some of which I've addressed in earlier posts. But sometimes, Apache server configuration settings can be the culprit.

One such scenario is a 404 error I recieved when navigating to anywhere but the home page. I couldn't be sure if it was the .htaccess file or a server setting, but then I found a great example of how to test whether mod_rewrite is enabled on the server.

It's important to note that redirects in the .htaccess file will still work, even if mod_rewrite is disabled. You need to specifically test with a rewrite rule. For example,

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^link([^/]*).html$ rewrite.php [L]

...in your .htaccess file should redirect any .html file to a file called rewrite.php. If you can reach the rewrite.php file directly in your browser, but arbitrary .html files return a 404 error, you'll need to contact you web service provider and request that mod_rewrite be turned on.

If you'd like more help, then contact me here or via our website design Ottawa shop.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Today's Joomla Tip: Fixing 403 Forbidden Errors

Apache mod_security getting you down? When this feature is enabled on your Apache server, you might encounter the following message when trying to save Global Configuration:

"403 Forbidden. You don't have permission to access /administrator/index.php on this server. "

You can disable this feature for your Joomla space by adding the following to your .htaccess file:

SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

If you'd like more help, then contact me via SEO Ottawa or via our website design Ottawa shop.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Today's Joomla Tip: JCE Content Editor

The JCE editor is a great alternative to the TinyMCE editor that comes standard with Joomla. For one thing, it has a built-in spell checker! You can set your editor to highlight misspelled words in your content, as you would see in most email clients.

It also has a few other nifty tools not found in the TinyMCE editor, and allows you to switch between HTML and formatted views without doing round trips to the server. It's a little thing that actually saves a lot of time.

Setup is pretty simple, if you keep a few things in mind. Once you've downloaded the JCE package you'll find that there are three installation files to upload to Joomla:

com_jce_152
plg_jce_152
jce_iframe_150

The first two should be installed as Joomla plug-ins. Go to Extensions -> Install/Uninstall and then browse to and upload com_jce_152 and plg_jce_152.

The third component should be installed as a JCE plugin. Go to Components -> JCE Administration -> Install and then browse to and upload jce_iframe_150.

Once these are sucessfully installed, go to Global Configuration and click on the Site tab. Under "Site Settings, set your "Default WYSIWYG Editor" to JCE, click Save and you're done!

If you'd like more help, then contact me here via SEO Ottawa or via my website design Ottawa site.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Today's Joomla Tip: Joomla 1.5 and SEF

I've tried a number of SEF add-on components to make my Joomla websites Search Engine Friendly. In the end I discovered that the core SEF module included with Joomla 1.5 works best.

However, moving websites from a development platform to live servers sometimes caused the SEF component to stop working. When enabled, all my pages would return "Internal Server Error". After a little investigation, here is what I've found:

1. Make sure the file ".htaccess" in the root gets ported along with the rest of the website! SEF, and in particular, Apache mod_rewrite will not work unless this file is present and correctly configured.

2. Porting a site sometimes means moving it to a different directory. If you're having trouble, try uncommenting the following line in .htaccess:

RewriteBase /

Where "/" is the root directory. If your joomla installation is not in the root of the webspace, be sure to specify the correct path here instead of just "/".


If you'd like more help, then contact me.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Today's Joomla Tip: Typography

Using your active template's CSS file you can set typography consistantly for the entire site. In particular, make sure the "Heading" styles are set to your preference. This way, when adding artical content you can set paragraphs as heading 1 though 6 with the confidence that style and colors will be maintained through all your pages.

In Joomla 1.5 go to Extentions -> Template Manager and select the currently active template (flagged as "Default"). Then click "Edit CSS", select the entry "template.css" and click "Edit". Here is an example of Heading definitions:

/* Heading */
h1 {font-size: 200%;font-weight: normal;color: #27AF4B}
h2 {font-size: 125%}
h3 {font-size: 125%;font-weight: normal;color: #27AF4B}
h4 {font-size: 115%}
h5 {font-size: 115%;font-weight: normal;color: #27AF4B;font-style:italic}

If you'd like more help, then contact me.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Website Design on a Shoe String Using Joomla

Joomla is a fantastic tool. You can get a fully loaded modern site, with all dynamic and fancy features, for a fraction of a cost of a regular website design - thanks to pre-existing components.

In a matter of days I was able to build a site with full search capabilities, a site map, dynamic drop-down top menus, a SEF component, and a complete ecommerce solution. Doing this from scratch would take weeks!

Today's Joomla Tip:

If you are setting up VirtueMart e-commerce on your Joomla website, do not customize Typography on your template until the site is fully assembled. We learned the hard way and then had to spent time re-adjusting display on the VirtueMart.