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.

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.

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:
   
   • http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/languages/translations-for-joomla
   • http://community.joomla.org/translations.html
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 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

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 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.

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.