Writing about PHP, WordPress, technical SEO, performance, and the occasional deep dive.
Enable Leverage browser caching for Joomla websites If you use firebug with either the pagespeed or Yslow plugin, you’ll be familiar with the persistantly red, top warning of ‘Leverage browser caching’ (‘Add Expires Headers’ with Yslow) This can be quite simple to fix by adding the following lines at the bottom of your .htaccess file.
I’ve just uploaded a weather module I created using the api from yr.no. It produces a 10 day, detailed weather forecast. Check out the details here And the demo here
Today I made a quick module for Joomla 1.5 to display a newsletter sign up box on your site. It connects with your AWeber account and signs up subscribers. I looked around and found that a module was made for mambo but never updated. There was a plugin for $30 that also used the registration
I have just created the custom html plus module to be able to add text to a component view and override the page title, meta description and meta keywords. I also added the functionality to add extra css and general code to the head section. Normally there is no option in a menu item to
If you have the beta test version of firefox then it can be quite annoying when you upgrade to find that most of your addons don’t work anymore. I used to scour the internet for working versions that people had managed to pull from google trunk, but last night I discovered a must have extention
The launch of a new site left me really confused a couple of weeks ago. The launch went better than expected, but a few days later people were registering on the site, which would have been great, except that there was no registration form on any of our pages. At first I jumped to the
Last night I had my first play with the new Adobe Edge prieview (available free to download and works for just over 100 days). It creates flash style objects using only html, css and javascript. Having never really used flash before I was unfamilliar with the layout of the program (it’s a kind of cut
NOTE: This post is old and not relevant anymore. I have removed the link as it no longer works! Facebook has just released its new messenger for windows but it only runs on Windows 7. Prior to this there was a leaked version whilst in beta phase that ran on Windows Vista. The new version
Set Expires Headers in .htaccess to speed up page load times If you use the firebug pagespeed addon or yslow you will be used to seeing the warning ‘Add Expires Headers’ This can be quite simple to fix by adding the following lines at the bottom of your .htaccess file.
Just put out a new google map module that plots tweets with info bubbles. Check it out here
@fontface is a great tool for giving your site an individual look, the down-side is that on a standard site, the font is downloaded on each page view. As the font can take a little time to download, the page text is loaded first and then the font is replaced once it has finished downloading
This is more apparent when using an AJAX refreshless search method, but affects all joomla sites using the default search settings. Here’s how to speed it up…
Well, the google +1 works fine, the tweet this button is cool, but really…..FHTML is rubbish. Basically facebook never picks up the current url through fhtml, unless I’m even more stupid than I think I am. Here’s how to get facebook to take the right url for each page.
If you have a K2store and your site is in multiple languages, you might have found that there was no way to translate your product attributes and their options. Now there is……..
In order to run the next generation of content management systems, you really need to be running an up to date version of PHP. The next incarnation of Joomla (1.6) requires PHP 5.2+As does Drupal 7 (as well as some current modules for the existing system) Look at any new CMS or shopingcart PHP software
The yr.no joomla weather module has now been updated to work with all UTF8 characters.
Just a quick note to say that the yr.no module has just been updated to add joomla 1.6 configuration parameters. I’m still testing it but there doesn’t seem to be any problems so far. Let me know if there are!
I’ve just finished the basics of the next version of the popular yrno joomla module. YRNO2 is Joomla 2.5 specific and has a load of new features including:
Open up your module zip file or download the module folder from your server. In the main directory there will be a php and xml file, usually with the same name as the module.
Today I was updating a joomla site using the MYAPI Facebook Connect conponent to show facebook feeds on a joomla site. When updating version 1.0 of the component to 1.4 I found that the site had turned to dust and saw nothing but a white page and empty source code. It turned out that the
A godaddy Virtual Private Server comes without Php-Mcrypt and Mhash installed. Here is how to install it.
Where are the Joomla Administration Header Images? To customise the Joomla admin header locate the images directory administrator/templates/khepri/images/ For the purpose of this tutorial we’re going to edit the default template style which is green. The files are contained in the folder
Joomla Estate Agency is an excellent real estate component for joomla. After using it for several sites and spending some time in the support forum I noticed there seemed to be some confusion on how to edit the property contact forms. So here is how to do it….
Many people seem to be having this problem. Here’s 2 solutions I found.
URL to preview joomla articles If you want to preview an atricle without adding a menu item you can use this url and add the item ID of the article on the end. index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= If you would like it to display the modules assigned to a menu item then you can add: &Itemid= using the
I recently had an email asking how I removed the ?task=search from the url of the joomla estate agency component. I originally removed the ?task=search query string as it prevents people from emailing the url of a property to a friend. When the url is visited by another user it will show a session has
Certain functions within joomla rely on a high/normal php memory limit. Certain web hosting companys have a very low php memory limit, around 8mb.
Xmap is a great automatic sitemap generator for the joomla content management system. It produces HTML (For your users) XML (for search engines) and news (Please fill me in!) The URL’s to these sitemaps however are not so search engine friendly.
Joomla .htaccess and SEO for Dummies The Joomla content management system provides a powerful, yet simple way for anyone to design a website. However, out of the box, a standard site is not set up with search engine optomisation (SEO) in mind. There are several simple rules that should be implimented into every Joomla
Joomla slows down page loading times by loading the full uncompressed Mootools 1.1 Javascript library. Here’s an easy way to speed it up…
Godaddy does not give root user login information as standard, but it is easy to switch to root user in an SSH terminal. Download and run the Putty SSH program from their site HERE. Or download the windows version directly HERE. In the “hostname” box insert the IP address of your server and click
Placing a flash movie or Google map on your page can be useful, but not when menu drop downs fall behind the flash object or iframe.
Rather than hacking the core files, which can be replaced with an update, place this line in your template index.php file above the </head> tag. <?php $this->setGenerator(‘Changethisline’); ?> Replace Changethisline with whatever you want to show or just leave it empty.
To change or remove the “Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL License.” links from the joomla administration area we need to edit 3 files: administrator/templates/khepri/cpanel.php administrator/templates/khepri/index.php administrator/templates/khepri/login.php
By default joomla shows a number by each article when listing all the titles in a category view layout. Here’s how to remove the numbers…
How to remove the xmap ‘Powered by Xmap!‘ link from your HTML site map.
Joomla loads Mootools.js and caption.js by default. If you have ever wondered why your simple pages load slowly, this could be the reason. If you have nothing that uses Mootools.js (dropdown menus and such) and want to speed up your site then it would be a good idea to stop it from loading. In