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Vancouver Joomla! Day – Recap

Raul — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:59:16 +0000

I had to miss a couple of sessions due to scheduling conflicts, but I managed to spend a large chunk of the day at Vancouver Joomla! Day. I was quite positively surprised by the large number of women in the audience (go tekkie women!), at a rate of about 1:3 (1 female per 3 males) and a very good turnout (about 120 people, 80 men and 40 women). Whomever said that nobody knew Joomla! in Vancouver, was seriously wrong.

EDIT – Here is the Flickr set of the Joomla! workshop.

I had to live-blog on Ash’s MacBook Pro, which on the one hand, is very pretty but I had a really difficult time creating posts because of the lack of familiarity with the computer. Furthermore, I wasn’t using my own TwitterFox (or Twhirl as I do from my desktop) so I had to Twitter from the web, which was a real annoyance.

Although I realize how young the Joomla! project is, I seriously would like to learn more about it. I found the sessions really interesting, although probably it would be of more interest to developers (and coders). So if you’re a high-tech geek, and you didn’t attend, you probably missed quite a bit. But not to worry, I have liveblogged a few of the sessions.

I’m exhausted and I really want to go home, because unfortunately I have lost my internet connection (that’s the problem with having a Mac broadcasting wireless signal and my laptop doesn’t get it. I got on the Vancouver Public Library network for a little while, but afterwards, I simply just couldn’t log on back, so I have been composing these posts on BlogDesk.

A big round of applause to Rastin, Ash, Teresa, Jen and all the sponsors, both media, service, food catering, etc. The audience was awesome too, I met some really interesting folks (although my conversations went a little bit too tekkie for my own liking – remember, I’m a non-tekkie blogger) [I know, somehow I don't think I can use this excuse anymore since I do most of my own HTML by hand, and I think I've learned a little bit about SEO and all the social media geekspeak]

Overall, a good morning and looking forward to spending some time with friends tonight, if my body doesn’t start acting up (I have been really pushing myself lately, and I seriously shouldn’t!)

Vancouver Joomla! Day – Security, performance and hosting

Raul — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:42:37 +0000

Chris Evans and Brad Baker – from the Joomla! project. They’re going to talk about security, performance and hosting. PeerGlobe and RMDStudio and Swing Candy all have pages describing the event, so you can check them out too.

We’re examining the installation of Joomla! FTP Configuration – if your files are written by the internet user, you can use the FTP to upload it.

QUESTIONS – Can you have 9 different websites that use the same images?
How you link to them and depending where they’re stored, yeah, sure.

Now we’ll spend a little bit of time talking about security, performance and hosting – it seems as always the hosts are on one side and the developers on the other side!

One of the most common things we see is Joomla sites being hacked. Joomla released a security patch. That being said, most of the hacks that we see are mostly third party components or extensions under the Joomla core. One secure/insecure component can be compromised. When a component is compromised you get a 777 directory under your attack. The attack cannot be spread.

[JOOMLA GUYS - MAKE SURE TO CONTACT ME IF I HAVE LIVE-BLOGGED SOMETHING WRONG!]

Joomla! Official Documentation Wiki

You can do a lot with Joomla! to optimize the performance. Sometimes you need lots of modules and lots of content. When you have to trouble-shoot – it’s super easy to do performance testing in Joomla! The kind of extensions that you run – you’d like to think that the developers would have done some reliance test.

Visit Joomla Performance – components that aren’t all that available.

When it comes to choosing a hosting provider – there are some really fast websites and on a sluggish server, it’s not going to work.

Vancouver Joomla! Day – Project Spotlight – Diabetic Diet Secrets

Raul — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:20:44 +0000

Diabetic Diet Secrets.com – Type II diabetes has increased 800% in the past 60 years. Vancouver has a substantial number of diabetes patients. The site is located here. Delivering diabetic education through the server.

AcaJoom – Newsletter – Every time they got a new person come in, suddenly they get the whole series of the newspaper – he can’t do that with Joomla. If you want to do a project that requires sophistication, Joomla is the way to go.

If you want to help reverse a huge problem, contact him through either of his sites. There is his contact information there!

Questions – What other tools did you use – Community Builder – works well. I’d like to be able to do that for people to log in at one time, they don’t have to log in through a separate form. People who can help me get all the photos in place.

I’m looking for people who can keep the site secure – I need a good tekkie [SIDE NOTE - He is so endearing and so nice! This is a very worthy cause - Joomla! Developers, come help!]

More door prizes! YAY!

Vancouver Joomla! Day – Project spotlight with Jim DeLaHunt

Raul — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:03:16 +0000

This will be a project spotlight on Jim DeLaHunt & Associates.

Jim will try to show what he’s accomplishing with his site (for his business). There’s a contact page (that’s how you can get in touch with him). There is a translation tool (the content can be translated into Japanese [SIDE NOTE - How cool is this!] and into German.

Jim is doing a quick poll to find out how many people speak other languages. Jim uses an extension called JoomFish (cute icon of a fish). The other part is sh404SEF (there’s corresponding stuff on Joomla 1.5, but this extension is basically Joomla 1.0) – in a short time you may be able to do exactly what you want to do on Joomla 1.5 that you can right now do on Joomla 1.0

Questions – JoomFish – can do multisites – apparently yes.

Question – If you are searching for this site and you got a browser whose preferences are in German, do you get descriptions in German?
Well, there is some provision for making the title of a page and the meta-tags – localizing them and localizing the content.

Question – If I come to a page with a URL that has no language tags – it will present the default URL in the default language.

[COMMENT - Apparently Nooku does content translation for Joomla 1.5]

Question – What type of difference would it make when you pick the language – would you want to pick the language to be Spanish?
For 1.0 and JoomFish 1.8 – it helps to select a default language for the website and then you localize the other languages. It may even be that JoomFish 2.0 may be a bit even handed. But you should make a language as primary first. You want to take steps to make sure that you are in UTF Encoding. Otherwise you’d be in trouble!

For the front page, for the default language, he wanted to make sure that the language code was inserted properly. He wanted his site to be even-handed.

AND NOW WE GO TO LUNCH

Vancouver Joomla! Day – SEO and Joomla 1.5

Raul — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:46:25 +0000

Steve Burg is speaking right now about SEO and Joomla 1.5 – I just arrived back to VPL so I am a bit behind in the liveblogging. @SwingCandy’s twitter stream will have a much better account by now. I will start with the notes now.

Problem 3 – Reasons

- Sites have a limited amount of Page Rank.
- It’s much easier to rank a smaller site.

Problem 3 – Solutions

- Block

* Calendars
* Photo galleries
* Tags
* Search clouds
* PDF pages
* Automatically translated pages

How to block

1) SEF Patch – add no follow
2) Robots.txt file
Disallow: /photos/

Why use Joomla if SEO is important
* The fixes to Joomla’s SEO problems really aren’t difficult
* The core team are aware of the problems and working on them.
* Content is king – no other CMS makes it as easy.

Recommended extensions
* Virtuemart – optimized shopping cart
* JReviews – outranks CNet and Amazon for competitive product reviews
* Mosets Tree – Spidered directory (really easy)

Joomla sites with great rankings
- WHreviews.com – webhosting reviews
- IPodSpeakerReviews – first ranked
- Triple-X.com.au – for wetsuits
- Joomla sites are 3 and 7 for CMS

Questions – Tricks for indexing quicker with Google News — you need to have a unique (at least 3 digit) unique number (most websites use the date). SHS will allow you to insert the date into your URLs. That’s the best way to do it.

Question – Converting an HTML what would you recommend – Absolutely one thing – DON’T CHANGE THE URLs, unless you can’t avoid it, just keep the same URL structure. Otherwise you’re risking your ranking.

Question – Keyword densities on a page – I don’t calculate these quantities. In the title, description, maybe italics in a couple of times. Make sure that the actual keyword is mentioned in all the important places. I wouldn’t bother with percentages.

Questions
1) How does Google recognize metadata?
Descriptions would matter for your most important landing pages, but often it is better to leave the description blank. Definitely your home page needs a really good description, your most important landing or category pages, but in general, it’s often better to leave descriptions blank.

2) A site that has a list of links – direct listings – if someone wants to put their sites – how would they go about doing that?
If you type in Joomla in the Google homepage, you get 7 pages. That’s all very fluctuating, sort of an experiment Google is doing. They go back and forth. The better established and more heavily traffiqued websites – you can’t really do much about it. At some point Google will follow.

Question – follow up on Joomla’s migration. Do you have to hand-enter each HTML URL to keep it the same? If you have to do – is there any way to automate this process?
The short answer is NOT. It really depends on your site structure. If you have a site – it depends on the number of folders. If you have an existing site with 5/6 folders, you start getting into a lot of problems. 2 folders you can automate – more than 2 folders, then you’re in a pretty painstaking process.

Question -

Vancouver Joomla! Day – Starting session

Raul — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:27:13 +0000

9.20 am I managed to borrow Ash’s laptop, so I am liveblogging on a Mac for the first time. Wow. I love MacBook Pro. Steve Jobs, send me a laptop, will you? Photos on Flickr will be tagged vanjoomladay

9.30 am Rastin is opening the session. Over 140 people are here (this is the largest ever Joomla! Day in Canada). A month ago, we had a WordCamp (90-100 people). Here we are, a LOT of people know Joomla! in Vancouver.

The Tazzu webpage can be found here. Brad Baker will start.

Joomla! is really easy to install. There are a handful of people who work full time with Joomla! Another handful do a lot of coding. About four people do Joomla! design templates. There is an abundant cross-section of people.

The Joomla! project – About 19 million page views, 15 million unique views, 40% bounce rate. Top content joomla.org. There are more than 3200 extensions that you can find at extensions.joomla.org.

10 people from the core team of Joomla Project are here right now There are hundreds of people involved in the working groups.

SIDE NOTE – I will have to take a break from the liveblog from about 10am to 11.30 or so, as I have to meet a colleague, but I’ll be back soon and will be back to the liveblog.

Question – How do you position Drupal against Joomla!? – The Drupal project is different to Joomla!

Question – The transition from one version to another is getting a bit problematic – do you think that’ll be solved soon? – Looking at statistic, more new extensions 1.5 – probably can’t talk about this right now.

Question – Several sites that are 1.0 – is there some means to transition to 1.5? There is a 1.5 migration group (and a live demo).

Question – Biggest challenges for Joomla project – Personal answer – getting more and more people involved so that development and business support can be expedited. It’s exciting. The project has gone from nothing to absolutely awesome growth.

Question – Is there a good blogging support? WordPress does have good support now – Have you seen the developers.joomla.org site? After listen to some of the presentations you might feel better. Joomla is a CMS and 1.5 is a solid framework. You will see, I think, some blogging add-ons although they’re coming along.

[Time for the next presentation - I am taking a break, back at 11.30am]