Should I Use Joomla Or Wordpress?

Now I could be wrong about this but I believe there are two groups of people who read this blog. There are those who are interested in Joomla Templates, and have arrived from the main site. And those who have come from search engines or from some of the niche marketing circles I have been frequenting.

If  you are part of the first group, those who love Joomla, own a Joomla website, or want to build a Joomla website then you may be wondering what this blog is based on. Yes you probably guessed correctly, it’s WordPress.

I am big fan of Joomla and I believe it is an excellent choice for many types of websites, but I also believe that you should pick your CMS based on what you intend to use it for and what you want to achieve.

WordPress is an excellent framework to quickly publish your thoughts and ideas to the web and I’ve chosen it for the JoomlaBear blog because I believe it is the most efficient tool for my purposes.

The main site at joomlabear.com is based on Joomla – Joomla 1.0.15 to be precise, and will very shortly be upgraded to Joomla 1.5.9.

So when to use Joomla and when to use WordPress? Well that is something I will be addressing in future posts because I think it’s an important topic and could save many of us days or weeks of grief in the long run if we choose the correct CMS framework that best matches our site’s purpose.

A strength of each system, off the top of my head:

Joomla’s user management which is built in and allows for user registration on your site out-of-the-box. Includes user email authentication, i.e the user must click a link in a n email they receive before their account is activated. Once registered a user will be able to use other components integrated into teh Joomla site such as forums, etc.

Wordpress on the other hand has an incredibly powerful commenting system which is built in – and for which I do not believe there is anything yet for Joomla that compares – not when spam protection and other factors are taken into consideration.

Of course there are hundreds of pros and cons for each platform, and amongst my many tasks over the coming weeks I intend to write a little bit more about this as I think it’s a topic that people will find very useful and something I have had quite a bit of experience with over the past couple of years.

In the meantime I want to let you all know I am installing a WordPress plugin that makes my comments “dofollow“. Wordpress by default ads a “nofollow” tag which means Google, and the other major search engines, ignore the link  back to the commentators website.

I’m removing this because I have decided I do not agree with the principal behind the nofollow tag – I believe if you take the time to comment you deserve a credit to your site. I also have a zero tolerance for spam and will not accept comments if they are spammy or off topic. And finally, I want to encourage people to interact with me and others here.

So go ahead and leave me a comment, what are you waiting for!

Changing Fonts In A Joomla Template

Something I’m asked quite often is how to change the font on a Joomla site. I thought I’d write a quick post about it because it’s an easy thing to do, but there are also some limitations. There’s also one other option for using cool typefaces on your Joomla site which I’ll touch on at the end – It’s called sIFR and uses flash and JavaScript to display a custom typeface. sIFR is really just good for headings as large blocks of type should not be rendered with flash.

Before we delve into how to make the changes it’s important to understand how fonts are displayed. Fonts in web pages are not embedded into the web page itself as many people think. The font must be on the end users computer to be displayed. The way it works is the template designer (or web site designer) will enter the font(s) they want to be displayed but it must be on the visitors computer to work.

This is why pretty much all web sites use one of the 10 or so standard fonts that are available on pretty much all computers – they include Ariel, Verdana, Times, Courier, Tahoma, Georgia, and a few others.

Quite simply all you need to do to change the font in your Joomla Template is edit the font list in your template css file. The css file is in your template folder on your live site – It is usually in a directory called “css” inside the template directory:

yoursite.com/templates/your_template_name/css/template.css

But, this depends on the designer who built your template as it’s not mandatory to structure files like this. It is good practice however and if you got your template from JoomlaBear then this is where you’ll find it.

• If you are using Joomla 1.0+ then your main template css file should be called template_css.css.
• If you are using Joomla 1.5+ your template css file should be named template.css

The simplest way to edit this css file is to do it through the Joomla admin. Joomla provides a nice method to access both your template index.php and template css file from the template manager.

• In Joomla 1.0 go to Site > Template Manager > Site Templates -Then select the template you are using from the list by clicking the radio button and hit Edit CSS.
  
• In Joomla 1.5 go to Extensions > Template Manager -Then select the template you are using from the list by clicking the radio button and hit Edit from the top menu. On the next screen hit the Edit CSS button at the top right of screen.

Depending on how the designer structured the CSS file you may need to change font specifications in a number of places inside the template css – especially if you want to change heading styles. Typically the base font will be declared in the body tag like this:

body {
	font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
	font-size: 12px;
	color: #CCCCCC;
	line-height:20px;
	background-color: #222222;
}

You can see in the example above that we have two fonts declared – Verdana and Arial – in this example the viewer of your site will see Verdana if they have it installed, and if not the viewers computer will try to use Arial – remember these fonts must be installed on the users computer to be seen on the web page. If Verdana and Arial were not available then the viewers computer would try to use any available sans-serif font installed. Neat eh!

Other common font-family combinations include:

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

And you can mix and match these as much as you like!

Sans-serif fonts are the straight and simple ones like Verdana and Arial – Serif fonts, like Times and Times New Roman. are the ones with little curly or pointy bits. An interesting fact is that sans-serif fonts are typically much easier to read on screen while serif fonts are easier to read in print! Have a look at any novel and you’ll see what I mean. However this is not true when the fonts are displayed at larger sizes so my recommendation is to go with a simple sans-serif font like verdana or arial for the body text and have fun with type faces like Trebuchet MS, Times, Tahoma, etc for your headings.

If you want to edit the heading font in your template css it will be exactly the same as above except you will need to locate the style in the css – you can do a quick “find” and search for “font-family” – if you whip through all instances of this you will find the heading styles pretty quickly. Or with Joomla you can be quite confident that your heading styles will be contained in one of the following styles:

h1
h2
h3
.componentheading
.contentheading

These are the default classes used for headings.

Hopefully this has been helpful – If you really, really want other typefaces in your template you can look at sIFR, which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. sIFR uses flash, css and javascript to replace blocks of text on your site. Its a cunning technique that I’ll be delving into further on this blog and using in some our fine Joomla Templates. Stay tuned.

Using The FireFox Web Developers Toolbar To Tweak Your Joomla Template

If you’re having trouble modifying your Joomla Template then read on as we show you a simple trick with the Web Developers Toolbar to help identify and fix layout and design issues.

So you’ve got your Joomla site all setup, you’ve downloaded and installed a template, or perhaps created one yourself, and now you’re finding that a few things don’ look quite right… Perhaps the menu is aligned to the opposite side from where you want it – or possibly the headings just look to big and are the wrong font.

It’s an experience that almost everyone setting up a Joomla site has at some point. And for those with no web design experience it can seem an impossible task to fix theses problems.

Luckily there is a very useful tool available called the Firefox Web Developer ToolBar. This toolbar, as the name implies, requires the Firefox web browser which you all should have anyway. If you don’t have it then grab it now.

Once you have installed it you’ll be asked to restart Firefox – don’t worry the latest version of Firefox is clever and will remember all pages you were viewing and reload them when it restarts – I accept no liability if this does not happen

Now you should see a row of tool bar icons in the top of your browser that look like the image below -  I have broken the icons out onto two lines to fit into this blog post:

I won’t cover every feature of the Web Developers Tool Bar as most are self explanatory. There are many useful tools here such as shortcuts to validate your HTML and CSS, options to display all the images contained in any page, and many many more tools that you will come to rely on.

However there is one shortcut that is completely indispensable and will help you find what’s causing those annoying glitches on your site! The shortcut is to hold down three keys on your keyboard: CONTROL-SHIFT-Y, if you hold  these three keys down for a moment (Using Firefox with the web devs. toolbar installed) you will then be able to move your mouse over any element within the current web page and highlight each element. When you click on a highlighted element an inset window will appear showing the CSS that is affecting this element.

Below is a screenshot showing our ever popular BlackBearPro template – In this live action shot you see the Web Dev’s Toolbar activated, the heading text has been moused over and the element has been highlighted – this element has then been clicked and you can see the inset showing the CSS that is governing this style including font, font size, color and very importantly the line number in the CSS (your Joomla template’s style sheet). I’m sure you can see how this makes it so easy to identify and tweak your Joomla template.

Click to see the full sized screenshot.

Joomla 1.5 SEO

This is the first in a series of tutorials I’ve decided to put together to share my knowledge of Optimizing Joomla 1.5 For Search Engines.

The information below is an outline of a number ot techniques and tools you can use to perform on-page optimization, but off-page optimization is also a very important part of Joomla 1.5 SEO, and I encourage you to check out my other posts on this.

We’ll look at the whole process in depth so grab a cup of coffee and lets get started.

For the uninitiated Search Engine Optimization, usually abbreviated to SEO, is the art of getting your website ranking in the search engines. When we say a website “ranks” it means your website appears preferably in the first few results when a person searches for keywords related to the topic of your website. It means the Search Engines think your site is extremely relevant, and an authority, on its subject matter.

Why do we want to optimize our websites for search engines? Well the more often you appear in the search engine results pages (often abbreviated to SERP’s) the more traffic will come to your site. Visitors are the currency we deal in on the world wide web. They make you, or the lack of them will break you.

Most of us don’t have enormous amounts of time to invest in optimizing our websites so I’m going to try to provide you with clear, concise information and we’ll start with the techniques that will benefit you most for the least effort.

There are a couple of things to understand before optimizing your website.

Firstly there are only 3 search engines you need to worry about; Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.
Google has about 60% market share – meaning 60% of all searches performed on the internet, Yahoo approx 30% and MSN/Live about %5. These statistics vary depending on whom you talk to, and they also fluctuate a little. Regardless these numbers are ok for us to work with as they are indicative of where our energies should be placed. Many people believe that there is only one engine you need concern yourself with… yes that’s right… Google. I actually disagree with this as I run a number of sites which Yahoo and MSN have both been very good to. However Google is the dominant player and therefore we will focus more on it in this series.

The second thing you need to know is that good SEO relies on only two factors:

1. On-site Optimization
   Good content, keywords relevant to what your desired visitors are searching for, and clear paths to your content that google can follow when it is indexing your website. Important: Good on-site optimization will only get you so far!
2. Off-Site Optimization
   This quite simply boils down to Backlinks, and this my friends is where it’s at. Again for the uninitiated, backlinks are simply links from other websites to yours. This is how Google really ranks your website. Each link to your site is counted as a vote. Some votes are stronger than others depending on where they come from. A link from an authority site with a good reputation will be worth more than a blog someone setup yesterday. More on backlinks later.

I said we’d keep it short and simple and we are – the above wraps up what you need to know before we get started on technique Don’t worry if it’s a lot to take in – we’ll be going over, and expanding on, many of these topics before the tutorial series is finished.

Getting down to it, On-Site Search Engine Optimization

As mentioned this is the first tutorial and for this session we will focus on a number of Joomla Extensions that will help you succeed in getting your site to rank on the search engines and drive traffic to your pages.

What we will focus on for the first few tutorials is on-site search engine optimization . This is really about making sure you have good content and then showing the search engines what your site is about and helping them to index as much of the information as possible. If you are very new to all this and are wondering about terms like Title Tags and Meta Tags don’t worry, we’ll go into these in detail soon!

Lets get started! All I want you to do this session is get an idea of the tools you will need – All the tools we will use are free.

Extensions we’ll be investigating and using in different combinations are:

1. Joomseo
2. Search Engine Friendly Patch
3. sh404SEF
4. Xmap/Joomap

There are three routes you can take.

1. The Lazy Approach To Joomla SEO
   This technique relies heavily on an excellent extension called Joomseo created by Phil Brown. We’ll also use sh404SEF and one of the sitemap components.
   Joomseo will take the pain out of optimizing your Joomla site for earch engines as it dynamically creates many of the necessary ‘tags’ and ‘meta tags’ that we want for good SEO. What it does is it takes the title of your article/content item and uses it for the Page Title Tag – You don’t have to enter this yourself manually. Joomseo takes care of this and many other things for you. Z
   The only problem is that SEO elements dynamically created by a computer running a script are never quite as good as taking the time to do it yourself. As a human being you have the power of rational thnking and can add your own experiences and creativity into the mix. More on Joomseo technique in the next tutorial.
2. The Logical Approach To Joomla SEO.
   This approach involves installing the Search Engine Friendly Patch from Joomlatwork. This is an excellent option and works just as well as my ultimate option below in many cases.Keep in mind we’ll also use sh404SEF and a sitemap as per the above.
   So what does it do? It lets you manually enter Title Tags and all Meta information for articles, front page and all menu items.The thing I really like about this option for optimisng your site is that it’s Logical, You enter the essential SEO information where and when you would expect t, in the parameters of each article or in the menu when you set it up.
   The downsides are this – The SEF patch is not compatible with all other components. As an example I have tested it with Virtuemart and unfortunately it doesn’t help much here – shop items are not covered (though this is not the fault of the SEF patch developers).
   Additionally the Patch is actually more of  hack, which in this context means you are overwriting core Joomla files. This isn’t a major issue or concern really  (don’t worry about the term “hack”) except when it comes time to update your Joomla it will overwrite the files you changed with the patch. The Joomlatwork guys are pretty good though and release new patch files very soon after any Joomla update – You’ll just need to re-patch your Joomla.
3. The Ultimate Joomla Search Engine Optimization
   In some ways this is the most complex of all the options to setup and get your head around, but in other ways it is actually the most simple once you get it running. It also only requires the one main component: sh40SEF which does all the grunt work by itself! (You will want to bolt a sitemap onto your site.)

   sh404SEF is truly amazing and indispensable. Something I have not even touched on here is that sh404SEF is going to handle your URL re-writing in this SEO method and the above two. This is the task it was designed to do and I have not even got to singing it’s praises for this yet. We’ll cover this in a separate tutorial.

   Like the SEF patch mentioned above sh404SEF lets you create your Title Tags and other meta individually – however where it differs is in that it lets you create this per URL, or web address. This means that this method is actually compatible with any and all other components you have installed on your Joomla site. This is because you can assign the additional meta to the URL. It’s so clever! It does not rely on any communication between itself and other components – It simply comes along afterwards and cleans up the mess.The only thing that takes a little getting used to with sh404SEF is that the workflow is not completely intuitive. Once you have written and published your content items you’ll then need to visit the sh404SEF component, browse a list of URLs, select the one you wish to modify and then add in your tags. This can be confusing especially when you have not got your content right in front of you to reference when creating the page title, etc.

   In spite of the final tiny gripe this is my preferred option and is the most powerful for the reason already mentioned – that any URL or address on your site can have a custom Page Title Tag, meta descriptin and all the rest. Fabulous!

Well I think that is enough for one session, I’ve been writing for about 3 hours… We’ll wrap up with a quick summary – I want you to have a think about what method above suits you best. Now that I have explained in minor detail how each option works I can quickly add a couple of other pointers to help your decision making.

Joomseo suits sites with large amounts of content, perhaps with new items being added daily or hourly. If you don’t have the time or resources to do manual tags for each content item then this is a good option for you. The sheer quantity of your content may help you win with the search engines.

Option two - The SEF patch is the most logical to use – the parameters are added while you are creating each page of new content. It’s sensible and intuitive and although more labor intensive than the Lazy Option it is faster for the average user to go with this option than option three. Don’t forget to factor in re-patching after each Joomla update!

The Ultimate Search Engine Optimization is what I use on 90% of sites I maintain. It takes more effort but the results are great and you can add your custom information for all additional components like Virtuemart or Sobi (note that sobi lets you enter meta but does not give you complete control over title as this is partly generated by the Joomla core. sh404SEF will let you customize these settings completely).

I hope you found this useful, thanks for stopping by, and I look forward to your presence on this site again soon.

If you have questions or suggestions please share your thoughts in the comments.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the feed or email updates – I know you want to read the next installment when we’ll dive into configuring these components and look at some techniques for writing good titles and descriptions!

Paypal Not Allowing Your Counrty Of Residence With Downloadable Products

This issue was solved with the help of a couple of our users who reported the error on their purchase and then continued to make test transactions for us from other locations in the world – Thank you! We really appreciate your help.

It’s been a big week completing the new template as well as the new shopping system. And for all our effort and testing we got rewarded with an unexpected Virtuemart Paypal error, Typical.

“Paypal does not allow your country of residence to ship to the country you wish to”

With much confusion and googling we discover we’re not the first to experience this error; And it’s not specific to Virtuemart. UberCart and other cart systems have also scored this error. Sandbox.paypal.com test accounts don’t produce the same results so this error isn’t discovered until the shop goes live (we’ll for all our test accounts no errors were produced. Your cart and Paypal configuration may be different). Now I can’t help a whole bunch with other systems but I did find a work around for Joomla + Virtuemart.

In our Virtuemart admin area we can select ’store’ then ‘list payments methods’, I have Paypal as my only active payment method. In the ‘configuration’ tab we get to set some parameters for pay pal like our  Paypal email. In the ‘extra info’ text area there is a bunch of PHP which pulls the users data and product info to be sent to Paypal for purchasing. It all looks dandy, until you configure Virtuemart for downloadable goods. Virtuemart 1.1.2 offers a nice revised check out to its earlier releases; We now get to skip all the billing and shipping info when we configure Virtuemart for downloads. This is good for the shopper which is always good for merchant. However in our first few lines of code in ‘extra info’ we’re still trying to pull the users ‘country code’.

$db1 = new ps_DB();
$q = “SELECT country_2_code FROM #__vm_country WHERE country_3_code=’”.$user->country.”‘ ORDER BY country_2_code ASC”;
$db1->query($q);

With no billing or shipping info the Virtuemart user data goes to defaults in the database. Mainly a lot NULL’s a couple of 0’s and one ‘US’ which is the default country code in the database. Lucky for us it’s easy to fix. If you look further down the PHP extra info (around line 22) you’ll find a line with “address_override” => “1″,. This is some Paypal API to help the shopper with payment when they get to Paypal. With out all the data fields this causes error, but it’s OK we don’t want the address/billing info anyway.

To resolve:

Change line 22 “address_override” => “1″, to “address_override” => “0″,. With this set Paypal wont try and gather all the other address information which isn’t there.
And to save 0.004 of a second we can delete the database request on the first 3 lines or comment it out.
//$db1 = new ps_DB();
//$q = “SELECT country_2_code FROM #__vm_country WHERE country_3_code=’”.$user->country.”‘ ORDER BY country_2_code ASC”;
//$db1->query($q);