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The Joomlashack Team Blog
How to lose the splash page
Splash pages (those annoying pages with some sort of fancy graphic or flash intro that say "Click to Enter" or "Skip Intro") are bad. I could spend a whole article trying to convince you of this fact, but I think this article does a better job of it than I could ever do.
One of the most common mistakes made by Joomla! designers is to assume that just because you loaded Joomla! in a directory called "http://www.yourdomain.com/joomla" or "http://www.yourdomain.com/cms" or "http://www.yourdomain.com/home" rather than your root web directory, you are stuck needing to create a splash or intro page in your root directory to point your users to the real site. Nothing could be futher from the truth. As a webmaster, you have a couple of options for pointing users to your content without the need for a splash page. I will try to cover those options in this tutorial.
Why I am excited about Joomla! 1.5
If you follow Joomla! news, you no doubt heard that Joomla! 1.5 beta was released on October 12 (or October 13, depending on what time zone you live in). This is great news for anyone using Joomla!, because it means that we are close to the stable release of version 1.5. I am extremely excited about this new version for several reasons, but as a designer, there is one main reason for my excitement.
That reason can be summed up in three words: no more tables! The new templating system for J!1.5 enables designers to override the default html output of the core Joomla! components and modules. This means that those pesky tables included in the default output can be a thing of the past, which means improved accessibility, more standards-compliant websites, and better SEO.
This new templating system, greater ease of extensibility (3rd party developers will have an improved framework for building components, modules, and plugins), and a growing, dynamic community make Joomla! the best CMS on the market. The possibilities of what can be done with Joomla! are limitless!
Linux World Expo London 2006
Well, another successful week in the Joomla! universe.
In case you didn't hear this week in London Joomla! had bestowed upon it for the second year in succession the Best Linux / Open Source Project award by LinuxUser and Developer Magazine
The event itself was a rip roaring success literally hundreds of (if not a few thousand) people turned up at the booth eager to learn about Joomla! in general and Joomla! 1.5b in particular. The first public unveiling of Joomla! 1.5b had tongues wagging and imaginations soaring, the heartening thing was that people just simply "got it".
Day one was spent on our feet, I got to London early afternoon and headed straight to the Exhibition centre suitcase in hand to be met by fellow Joomla! community member Mitchell Annable (Nottingham UK) and Joomla! core developer Johan Janssens (Diest Belgium). I was there five minutes before Johan turned to me and said "Man the booth I need to go hire a tux for tonight" - So in at the deep end for me!
From minute one it was non stop I didn't get a breather, not even a drink of water, until late afternoon. By this time Johan's fellow core team members Peter Russell (Leeds, UK) and my buddy Louis Landry (New Orleans, USA) had also returned to the booth, although we didn't get a chance to even say "hello" to each other for at least two hours.
Day two was a little quieter (but not much) and it was fun to see Johan holding an impromptu conference over at the Drupal booth sharing ideas and answering questions while Peter and Louis went and did some PR "work" with the LinuxUser and Developer magazine booth babes - check out the pics over at Joomla.org
From a Joomlashack perspective it was great to meet a some of the UK based Joomlashack community that popped by to say hello, it's always nice to meet people in person and hear that we're doing a great job - so a big thanks goes out to those that I met
Joomla 1.5 is Here
Is is a bird?
Is it a plane?
No... its an open source revolution, the birth of Joomla 1.5 beta finally arrives.
Smoothing Screen Fonts in Windows
Often times in the forums when someone has a display problem with their template and I can't replicate it from my Mac, I usually ask them for a link or a screenshot of the problem. I must say I am very surprised at the number of users who are still operating in Windows XP with ClearType disabled.
If your fonts look ragged or almost pixellated, you may be able to make your eyeballs a lot happier by turning on ClearType.
I highly suggest you run this tool for tweaking your display preferences. There are alot of other resources out there as well.
Russian Hackers Foiled by Joomla
Rob Schley just posted some interesting news at the main Joomla dev blog:
"During what is called the ìDeface Realtime Compoî Competition up to 150 Security Specialists, hackers, and crackers bomarded the CMS with attacks for 2 days straight without success. Both Joomla! and PHP-Nuke were evaluated during the competition and both systems received positive evaluations. Along with the positive evaluation, we received a certification from the WebSecure Group, declaring that Joomla! was reliable and recommended for use."
Its good to know that 150 hackers can't break into Joomla after two straight days. You can read more about it and the associated forum post on the Joomla dev blog.
Joomla.org breaks the top 500 most visited sites on the web
Brad Baker, the man behind the curtain at the joomla.org forums made his first dev blog post a few days ago. He talked about some of the traffic that joomla.org gets. What was most interesting is that joomla.org just broke an Alexa rank of 500. That means it is now one of the 500 most visited site on the web.
He also noted that the forums are one of the 30th biggest on the web.
Great stuff!
Is Joomla Ready for Big Time?
When I talk to clients, the usual comment about Joomla is that its a CMS for very small businesses or small personal sites. My ususal response is these two great sites, both are made with Joomla:
www.porsche.com.br
www.unric.org
More and more bigger organizations are turning towards Open Source as a viable CMS solution.
Welcome to web 3.0!
Site Updates
Important Announcement Below:
All new and returning users please read. Thank you.
Welcome back to Joomlashack!
If you're a returning user, you'll notice things look a bit different. This is just part of our latest relaunch which includes some added FAQ's, a knowledgebase, screencasts and a few more tutorials (all of which we're going to be updating over the next few days). Aside from that, we have some more structural changes designed to make your visit more functional in terms of support and purchasing.
Please read more to familiarize yourself with these changes.
Joomlashack featured on Joomla Design Site
Joomlashack has been featured on the Joomla design showcase site joomlaform.com. Corey Webb searches out Joomla sites that show good form and showcases them as inspiration of what can be done with CSS design and Joomla. "The reason that I chose to feature this site is because it clearly exhibited good form" says Corey. Check out the review at joomlaform.com.
Thanks Corey! We appreciate the praise, your project hopefully will push Joomla designers to work harder with CSS and valid XHTML design.
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