It’s on the cards folks – just as soon as we finish updating the current templates to include our new framework feature set. Stef has also been working on a new version of CU3ER that looks amazing! Check out the video preview.

CU3ER v1 – screencast from CU3ER on Vimeo.

Most importantly search engines tend to rank content with a search engine friendly URL more highly due to the keywords that are contained in the URL. If you look at the URL of this very page you will see:

blog.joomlabear.com/setting-up-search-engine-friendly-urls-joomla-sef/

This URL tells Google, and other search engines, that the page is most likely about a number of things, such as; Search Engine Friendly URL’s, SEF and Joomla. This reinforces the other primary on-page factors Google looks at, the page title tag and content.

Another very nice side-effect of a SEF URL is that when somebody copies and pastes your link into a blog or forum they give you a link back with keywords in the URL. This is a big bonus, and something that will be explored again in a future blog post.

In this video I show you as quickly as possible how to setup basic SEF within Joomla (yeah I can’t help rambling about little details – It is a long video again, and I’ve got a slight cold, sorry!)

If you want to skip straight to the quick SEF URL checklist and resource list this is under the video.

Quick check list to get SEF URLS working in Joomla

1. Access htaccess.txt in your root directory and rename it to .htaccess
2. Visit your Joomla Global Configuration and in SEO settings set all options to ‘yes’ and save.

To access your root directory you can either use FTP or your web host’s file manager, as I have done in the video demonstration.

FTP access is something I consider essential for anyone serious about running a Joomla site, or any website for that matter – it still surprises me how many Joomla users I meet who have no idea what this is or how easy it is to setup. With FTP you can access your Joomla installation and manipulate files directly – you can upload and download files, rename, change permissions, etc.

If you want to access your site with FTP then here are a couple of quick tools I recommend:

1. Firefox – A free web browser – from our web stats I know that more than 50% of people visiting Joomlabear already have Firefox – this message is for the other 50% – Get Firefox here!
2. FireFTP is a free plugin for Firefox that lets you FTP into your website directory from within your web browser, as seen on TV in the video above. Get FireFTP here (Install Firefox first, then add this plugin).

To access your site with FTP you only need the following:

• your FTP address, usually ftp.your-domain-name.com
• A username, your hosting account login usually works
• A password, your hosting account password usually works.

If in doubt contact your web host for these details.

If you prefer the file manager option, Blue Host offer very affordable and reliable hosting and cPanel can save you a lot of time with many different admin tasks. You can also get a free Joomlabear template membership with any new Blue Host account – more details on this offer and Joomla hosting with Blue Host here.

I helped a friend out last week with a few tweaks to a GPL licensed Wordpress theme, her site is all about iPad accessories and you can check it out at that link or by clicking the screen shot.

I got to thinking while we were tweaking a couple of layout elements that this Wordpress theme would probably be very well received by the Joomla community. Because the theme has been released under the GPL license it means we have the authors permission to modify and extend upon the existing work and redistribute it as a Joomla template. Of course we would give plentiful and due credit for the creators great work

Anyway, before I begin work on porting this theme  I would like to see a show of hands from people interested in having this available as a free Joomla template in our collection.  Because we can’t see your hands eagerly flying up over the interweb (not without a web cam anyway) I’m going to ask for a round of comments instead.

When the comments reach 20 we will begin work. From there it should just be a couple of days work.

What do you say?

If you LOVE Joomulus please show your appreciation by using the social bookmarking links at the bottom of this post. Or you can go ahead and DIGG right now! Or add it to your delicious bookmarks!

Updates include:

The mouse pointer displays as a hand when hovering over tags – as you would expect for a hyperlink.

X and Y scaling is fixed – you can get an elongated spread of tags by adjusting this value as seen in our Joomulus Demo.

Language/character sets included in this module are as follows:

1. English/Basic Latin
2. Greek/English
3. Japanese – Kana
4. Bulgarian/Russian/Serbian/English – Cyrillic Base
5. Portuguese/Polish/English – Latin Extended Base

We plan to release Turkish, Chinese and a number of others very soon – time did not allow for this release – leave your comments and suggestions below.

DOWNLOAD HERE

The template now features built in Son of SuckerFish dropdown menus, and we have integrated Drew McLellan’s Transparency Fix for IE6 and below.

We have also added a SlideShowPro Installation to the demo site. NOTE This is not included with the template as it is a commercial product and needs to be purchased seperately – However we are offering a new Joomla and SlideshowPro setup service,  where we set up your Joomla website with SlideshowPro and the Director Image manager.

To download or upgrade TransBear please visit the TransBear – Transparent Joomla Template page.

Some things you should note are as follows – The transparency fix requires an image named x.gif be placed in your site root directory. We have included this in the template installer – but it is not possible to install this into the Joomla root via the template installer- the file named x.gif will be in your site template root directory after installation and you should move this to the site root so that the transparency fix works correctly for IE6 and below.

Additionally for the drop-down menus to function you need to apply a module class suffix of  _sf to your menu module and publish in top-nav position. As shown in the screenshot below:

Check out the demo site which features Artificial Christmas Trees displayed with the K2 content construction kit.

Leave us a comment if you like it – and leave a comment with a link if you use it for your Christmas web promotions.

For more information, and to download, visit the Joomla Christmas template page on the main site.

I also want to give you all a heads-up about what I consider to be the new heavy-weight Joomla SEF extension that you should consider using over the other big names in SEF URL’s.

I’m switching to AceSEF because it’ faster and the support is amazing – It’s the type of support we give out at JoomlaBear, a willingness to get in and sort things out for our users. And this type of support is rare.

Below is my review of AceSEF:

I just had the best support experience I have ever had with anything related to Joomla. I contacted JoomACE via live chat to ask a couple of pre-sales questions – mainly to find out if AceSEF would be able to handle everything I needed for a Joomla/K2 installation.

A polite and courteous individual helped me through all my questions via Live Chat – and very promptly too.

So I went ahead and setup AceSEF and found that a feature I had wanted for SEF and K2 was not working the way I wanted – Please note, not a fault with AceSEF but a special requirement for my site – a URL format that would not be typical for most users (I’m pedantic about these things

So I got back on the live chat with JoomACE and within minutes their developers were logging into my Joomla installation and adding a new feature to the extension! AMAZING SERVICE!

I can’t recommend this extension highly enough – I’ve used sh404SEF on over 100 Joomla sites that I have built in the past 3 years – But I’m switching to AceSEF – It appears to run faster, and the support…  need I say anymore?

Final note – I’ve spent days testing various SEF extensions and hacking the sh404SEF extension for K2 – nothing worked properly – AceSEF solved all my K2 SEF issues out of the box and is the BEST option if you are using K2 and Joomla – in my opinion.

Give it a whirl.

AceSEF Control Panel Screenshot

Our Free Halloween Joomla Template is live and the official template page can be found at the previous link. There you will find links to download, source files, documentation of module positions, etc.

The demo site was designed around the idea of a simple Halloween costumes store. I didn’t really get time to flesh out the store with sample products so I hope you will just appreciate the overall aesthetic of the design and then put it to good use in your own projects.

Below is an image of my finished artwork in Adobe Fireworks – everything is on layers so elements can be switched out, edited, etc.

An example of how useful this can be is a quick hue/saturation filter I applied to the background layer, which gives us a really nice alternative effect:

The source files for this project are available to premium Joomlabear members in our downloads area.

I wanted to talk briefly about how I created the artwork and give credit where credit is due.

I’m very proud of the moon – this was created by cutting out an actual photo of a moon and then sitting it over the top of an orange gradient – I then changed the blend mode to Freeze to give a very orange Halloween look.

The font which I used for the logo, and which looks like dripping blood, or something right out of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is called Creepsville. It’s free for any use so you can grab this and make your own logos, etc.

The background was created using Photoshop, I took an image that  had a large amount of the night blue color in the template, and ran a Gaussian blur over it. I then used a number of excellent free photoshop cloud brushes from Qbrushes, and set them to black – overlaying these over my blue background.

The various Halloween icons, such as the Jack-O-Lantern, spider, cat, crow, bats and witch (you did spot the witch didn’t you?) were taken from an excellent Halloween Photoshop brush set from Obsidian Dawn. Love your work guys.

Hope you all enjoy the template! Leave a comment and let me know if you found this useful, and what projects you are using the template on.

Update The Halloween Joomla Template is now available for download. You can also check out my post on the making of the Joomla Template for Halloween which lists various resources that were used.

Ok, ok, I know we’re a little late to the party on this one as Halloween is just around the corner – but we have a brand, spanking new Halloween Joomla Template for you, and it’s just hours away. I have a little bit more testing to do and I need to check the XML and make sure all the required  files are referenced correctly. Then we’ll put it up for you all.

I know it would have been more useful to many of you earlier in the piece, but I thought I’d put it up  anyway as I’m quite proud of the design, and it may be useful to people who want to run some kind of last minute Halloween promotion – or maybe give your Joomla site a face-lift just for Halloween day!

You can preview and marvel at this little beauty, if you are in the mood you could even buy yourself a nice Halloween costume and have it delivered! Just click the link.

Now this is a free Halloween template for Joomla – so support will be limited. I will also be asking people not to redistribute this template under any circumstances.

Stay tuned for the release!

I’m doing deep research into the K2 Joomla component because I’m strongly considering using it for an Article Directory project I’m now involved in. This directory needs functionality that will enable users to join the website, post their own content, upload images and videos, provide commenting, tagging, etc and all of this in a straightforward and simple way that even technically challenged users will still find it easy.

K2 looks fantastic for this – we can set image resizing options and quality in a parameter – so images that are uploaded will automatically be converted to these dimensions and quality settings. This is something I love about Wordpress and now with K2 it looks like we are going to be able to do this easily in Joomla as well.

Lots of other great looking features under the hood – the main thing that K2 does is lets you add additional fields to your content items – so for instance you could add a download field to the bottom of each article if you wanted to create a downloads site, etc.

I won’t harp on but encourage you to watch the video above. I will be posting about my experiences developing with K2 as I go so stay tuned and subscribe to the feed.

In other news I have recently been talking to a friend and fellow Joomla developer about building a Joomla affiliate store. She has done a great job with her Halloween Costumes store built with Joomla. She has used a Joomla component to import a feed of products as opposed to adding them one by one as I did with the ipod nano cases demo site.

This will obviously save a lot of time and I’ve had many questions about doing this since posting my original article on the topic. The extesion is a commercial one provided by http://joomlashopbuilder.com/