Joomla Ottawa

Joomla 2.5.1 Released: I am Sold

2012-02-14T12:15:00.000-05:00

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.

Caching Issue with Rockettheme's Template

2012-01-26T13:36:00.002-05:00

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.

Multilingual Support in Joomla 1.7

2011-11-17T10:22:00.000-05:00

Below is a simple step-by-step summary of how to enable multilingual feature in Joomla 1.7:

Login to your website, from the Control panel go to Extensions > Extension Manager
Install a Language pack. You need a separate language pack for each language. Download language packs from here:
- http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/languages/translations-for-joomla
- http://community.joomla.org/translations.html
After you’ve installed the required language pack(s), go to Extensions > Language Manager
In Language Manager, select the Content tab, create a new item corresponding to the language you’ve installed.
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.
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.
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.
To add Articles in various languages, simply go to Article Manager, Add 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.

Joomla Extensions: MMPortfolio

2010-04-22T11:29:00.000-04:00

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.

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

2010-03-21T18:26:00.001-04:00

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

Today's Joomla Tip: Porting sites with JoomlaPack

2010-02-14T16:28:00.002-05:00

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.

Fixing capitalization on Joomla standard contact form.

2010-01-28T19:15:00.000-05:00

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.

Today's Joomla Tip: 404 Errors and mod_rewrite

2009-08-14T22:26:00.002-04:00

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.

Today's Joomla Tip: Fixing 403 Forbidden Errors

2009-06-16T22:25:00.001-04:00

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.

Today's Joomla Tip: JCE Content Editor

2009-04-26T15:08:00.000-04:00

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.

Today's Joomla Tip: Joomla 1.5 and SEF

2009-04-01T19:21:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-03-31T16:37:00.000-04:00

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.

Website Design on a Shoe String Using Joomla

2009-03-29T19:33:00.000-04:00

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.