Writing about PHP, WordPress, technical SEO, performance, and the occasional deep dive.
I recently bought a new pc, and was a bit quick to install Windows, create a backup drive and remove the disk to install the larger ssd from my previous computer. The upshot of that was that, after installing the operating system on the new drive, it wouldn’t activate Windows as I didn’t fully activate
WordPress allows the upload of different filetypes to posts through custom fields, but it only understands certain file types by default.
Sometimes, for whatever reason, I need to find out the exact version of Joomla a site is running without being able to access the administration area. Here’s where to find the version number in the file system.
I recently ran into an issue whilst trying to change the nameservers for a German (.de) domain name. When I tried to point the domain to a whm/cpanel install I got the error ‘Failed to Modify Domain Nameservers: The domain DNS check has failed’. The reason for this is specific to .de domains.
I was asked to find a list of posts in a WordPress install where the body text contained a certain string. Subsequently, I discovered how bad the search is in the post listing screen and decided it would be easier to find them in the database.
There are many articles out there on how DNS prefetching works so I will keep it brief. It works by adding a link to the head of your web page with a relationship of ‘dns-prefetch’ and the url of a domain which holds assets needed for the page to load. That could be a cdn
There was no big announcement, but you may have noticed that the Joomla 3.2.2 templates area now has a compile LESS button when viewing a less file. I had a look at how to bring this into a custom template without having to use a plugin, giving you the possibility to compile a templates less
Finding extensions for Joomla 1.5 is not so easy any more, and when you do find something you need there is a good chance it doesn’t work anymore (php versions, api changes etc). I was asked today to add a recaptcha field to the standard contct form on a 1.5 site. Please, no comments about
Unfortunately I was on the receiving end of this bug before finding out that it existed. Apologies to anyone trying to download my extensions – I have just enabled all new user accounts. Updating to Joomla 3.2 introduces a new option which allows you to disable email sending globally. You can find it in Global
I guess it’s been a long time coming but, as more and more sites need to be upgraded to the latest Joomla versions, I finally put together a starter template using the best practices I have built up over the past 6 years of helping people speed up their Joomla websites and helping them share
In the days of Joomla 1.5 there were a few limitations to using core content for anything other than simple pages. Yes, plugins were available but they couldn’t handle things like nested categories, item specific galleries and videos etc etc. Many components were created to combat those limitations but the outright winner in terms of
For reasons detailed in an earlier post about why Joomla canonical urls are not implemented correctly it may be that you want to remove them. That’s pretty easy by hacking the core, but safer to unset the tag in your template so the changes don’t get wiped out on an upgrade.
Ideally I like to keep all urls in lowercase, but there are a few things that can lead to your site being indexed with a mixture of upper and lower case characters, which in turn can lead to problems with search engines. How can this happen? Well, for me it was playing around with Joomla’s
Joomla 3 introduced a new feature of canonical url links. There is no way to turn it off in settings, which wouldn’t be a problem if it worked correctly, but unfortunately it doesn’t. It has been plagued by problems since it was introduced and has led to some sites taking a massive hit on visitor
For a while now in Google webmaster tools there has been an option under the ‘optimization’ tab called ‘Data Highlighter’. This is their new attempt at an alternative to structured data (or another way to add it without changing the structure of your pages). It is essentially a wizard interface to get Google to understand
In Joomla 1.5 this was quite easy as there was generally only one homepage (multiple in Joomfish but the same check worked for all). With the introduction of multi-language in 1.6 (or was it 1.7?) it was made a bit more difficult as it is possible to have multiple homepages, and checking for them involves
I wrote about this a while ago in my Joomla microdata article. It has struck me since that it was complete overkill to add authorship in that way and can be done without any code changes at all, just using the standard contacts component. The reasoning is, that you don’t have to link each article
Adobe recently released their ‘blank font’. It is essentially a font which contains no glyphs and is basically a css hack to stop the flash of unformatted text when using webfonts. I wrote a long time ago about how to cache the font files when using @fontface. That method can be used in conjunction with this
Spam mail is an unfortunate fact of life. The more things we sign up for, the more our addresses get sold as marketing lists. There is one area where we can try and minimise the collection of email addresses though and that is when pasting them on a website. These days, content management systems such
Google has been using microdata for quite a while now and adding it to your website can help with clickthrough rates from search engine results. The most obvious is Google’s own authorship markup (not strictly microdata per se) where linking to your Google+ profile adds your profile image to pages in search results, but there
Last month (April 2013) Twitter announced the introduction of a new set of meta tags known as ‘Twitter Cards’. Adding these tags to your site allows extra information such as an image and description to be attached to any tweet which contains a url of a page on your website. You can read the twitter
Sometimes you just need the root path, for whatever reason. If you can’t get it you can create a php file and include the following lines.
There has been a few reports about not being able to install Joomla because it stalls at the installation and you can’t get past the first installer step. Whilst there are many reasons why this could happen, most times I have come accross it it has been down to the server setup and Joomla not
There are hundreds of plugins, modules and components which add Facebook opengraph tags to your articles, but is it really necessary to add an extension for the sake of a couple of meta tags. There was a time when Facebook ignored your standard meta tags and insisted that you add a specific opengraph tags for things like page title
Sometimes there is a need to get the current content/site language to use in other places. An example being when you want to set social share buttons to display in the same language as the site. Luckily Joomla makes this easy for us.
Contact forms are supposed to make it easy for users to ask a question or just get in touch. These days, with all the captcha and anti-spam methods attached, the chances of a form being filled in incorrectly and not being sent is highly likely. The number of people using mobile devices who might loose
Global layouts were introduced in Joomla 3 so that they are no longer limited to a particular view or extension. In this example I am going to create a new view for the tags component which will output a plain comma separated list so that I can use it in a facebook opengraph tag.
I was recently asked a couple of times about international SEO and targeting websites with similar content at the correct people without just serving up a duplicate site. The most obvious example of this is a .com website which is meant for American audiences and .co.uk which is meant for England, but it could also be
The future is here, the future is now. Boomla 3 has been sent back from the future to fitful our mobile bogging needs. I’ve been away for the weekend so what better time to sample a piece of the future. And what better time to test android s predicted words features.
Ok, so I moved my site. I used to have a domain called serach-friendly-web-design.com, I moved all that stuff to here because I thought that the information I gave was benifical to other people and I should retain the pages. So basically, if anyone goes to an old page they will get to see what
At first a content delivery network seems like a great idea, but is it possible that it can actually be detrimental to your sites speed? Lets find out.
The reference field is not something that is new in Joomla 1.6 and up. Joomla 1.5 had a ‘Key Reference’ field in the articles advanced parameters tab. What is different is where the field is now found and the way the data entered is utilised. In Joomla 1.5 the content of the key reference field
Template overrides are great, but sometimes you have no choice but to take a component apart to get it to do what you want it to do. It’s great that all the code is open and you are able to do that too. What’s not great is when you hand over that site to someone
So Joomla 3 has been around for a while now and seems stable enough that you can use it for production sites without having to check up on it everyday to see if anything new has broken. And with a new site comes a new template. As always, I wanted it to be fast loading,
To redirect all pages from http://www.olddomain.com to http://www.newdomain.com in the domain root of your old domain create a .htaccess file and paste the following code, changing the domain name:
I stumbled upon this yesterday whilst looking for something completely different… In windows 7 and vista you can activate a hidden ‘god mode’ which creates a desktop control panel giving you direct access to many useful features.
Add MIME type and Expires Header to Favicon Add these lines to your .htaccess file to speed up favicon loading, as specified by the Yahoo Yslow documentation.
Today I was looking into moving our company blog to a new joomla 1.6 test site so I could experiment with a bit of HTML5 Due to the structual differences between 1.5 and 1.6, there is no option to import data from the backup of an old site like it was when upgrading from 1.0
Another red warning light when running google page speed or yslow that is quite easy to sort out if you are running your own server. First you need to know how to login through SSH as root user which you can do by reading this post. And you need an editor installed to be able
I have been working recently with the K2 component/plugin K2store. As a simple shopping cart it works great, but I had a nightmare trying to get hold of any translation files. The forum is full of people asking questions about how to translate different parts of the store into lots of different languages, but no
Google, Bing, Yahoo and all search engines are instructed not to index photos from a default installation of Joomla.With the advent of blended search results, why would you not want your images to be indexed and shown alongside your site in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS)?
Although not on the official page speed site, Google have actually released a version of pagespeed that runs on Firefox 4. Why it’s not on the site I have no idea, I would imagine it would have something to do with pushing developers towards chrome. Anyway, the link is here:
I was asked earlier today to create a Google+ widget for a website to replace a twitter widget. I was suprised but also interested to get it working. Currently there is no widget maker from Google but there is an api which allows you to do the same thing.
Compress all files through .htaccess Here’s a few more tips to speed up your joomla website through your .htaccess file. Borrowed from the magento standard .htaccess, which contained some nice code to compress, or not compress depending on the user agent calling for the page. The lines look like this, and can be added to
I’ve been working for a search engine optomization company for many years now. I still see the whole process offered by many companies as a little bit shady. At the end of the day, nobody can make a search engine do what ever they want. You can’t pay google to move you up higher in
Inspired by Robert Vining over at www.joomstew.com and the fact that I am building most of my new sites using Joomla 1.7, I decided it was time to finally migrate this site to the latest Joomla version. I think the actual decision maker was when I was adding about 50 flickr gallery modules to a
I only realised a few days ago as I looked into someone elses site that the standard url on an xmap sitemap for the homepage is /home Both this and the standard / urls exist and it can lead to problems when getting indexed. Here’s how to sort it out…
I was looking for a simple latest news slider module for joomla 1.5. You would think that there are hundreds of them around but nothing really fitted what I needed and anything that did was using jquery which conflicted with the ajax search and twitter modules. Plus I don’t really want to be loading 2
Joomla Estate Agency Canonical URL Problem, solved Before reading this please note tht some php code has been stripped out of this article. I’ve included a zip of a text file at the bottom containing all the code update #2 – I found a way to do this automatically in the end, the info is
Joomla estate agency component has had the ability to use the title alias in the url since the last major update. The currently available plugin for xmap still uses the old url structure which just uses the property id. I noticed this when checking on a site made a couple of years ago which has