Since we expanded into Drupal and Wordpress training quite a few people have asked variations on these questions:

• "Are you abandoning Joomla?"
• "Do you think Drupal and Wordpress are now better than Joomla?"

The simple answers are no and no. Last summer we discussed how smart companies were now supporting several CMS platforms and gave some reasons why. I like to think we're just following our own advice.

I've another reason to add ... Joomla companies are remarkably dynamic and entrepreneurial. Looking back over the last few years, Joomla has been a remarkable hotbed of innovation, particularly when it comes two areas, business models and design:

Building an online reputation begins with your website. It is the first place people go to “check you out,” even if you have been highly recommended by clients or peers.  So, crafting an effective and powerful message in conjunction with an aesthetically pleasing site, a well-organized site and one with a clear call to action sometimes means hiring a good writer.

There are a bunch of reasons to hire a good content writer, but I will only mention the three I think are most pertinent to web site progress.

1. You hate to write!  That’s a no brainer in my opinion.


2. Your website project has come to a screeching halt!  Your web developer has told you that he/she cannot move forward without your content and you don’t have time to deal with that right now.


3. You have run out of creative ideas! If you are working solo - this just happens unless you have collaborative partners.

Well currently 12 16 ways but with your help we will make it 101!  I'll update the post as and when we get more ways to speed up your joomla site.

What with Matt Cutts recent (ish) interview with Web Pro News, he mentions that google will be taking page load times into consideration when they rank your website. What does this mean for all the joomla users?  Can joomla keep up?

Here's a little fix we came across today while trying to find out why blog posts on this site had started always showing today's date. Even if a post was written in 2006 or 2007 it would show a 2010 date. Thanks to Anthony from Joomla Bamboo for helping me find the fix.

The problem is with overrides and you're likely to find them in this folder: / templates / your-template-name / html / com_content / article / default.php

The correct date line is going to look similar to this:

<?php echo JHTML::_('date', $this->article->created, JText::_('<div class="month">%b</div><div class="day">%d</div>%Y')); ?>

I've highlighted the two elements that need changing: JText::_( before the opening div and an extra ) at the end. The original line is likely to be found in templates that were created around Joomla 1.5.13 and earlier. It's more likely to look like this:

<?php echo JHTML::_('date', $this->article->created, '<div class="month">%b</div><div class="day">%d</div>%Y'); ?>

Because commercial and custom templates often don't get updated along with the Joomla core, errors like this can remain on a site.

And yes, this post was really written in 2010.

This tutorial is similar to last week's in two ways: becaue it's the answer to a question asked by a user in our support forum and also because it deals with managing people signing up on your Joomla site.

It has one important difference however ... it's much shorter! This week's tutorial explains how to approve Joomla users when they register. You might have a school website and only want to approve parents or students. You might have a club website and only want to have members join your site. This tutorial will show you how. We're

I'm actually quite fascinated with this little tool from Google...  apparently its quite controversial and I can see why.

So far I've not really done a lot with it, other that leave complaints on websites to warn other people about dodgy dealings...  one of the main comments that sticks in my mind is a site where I bought my girlfriend some flowers and she did not get anywhere near the amount of flowers that were in the picture, I complained directly and got little worthy response, so decided to take action. I think people are usually more driven to complain using Sidewiki than they are to give due praise.  That’s just human nature I guess.