Joomla Ping Extension
A little note for all Joomla users – Joomla often does not get the immediate exposure it deserves in the search engines, at least not compared with Wordpress, and the reason is simply that it lacks the inbuilt pinging capability that Wordpress has. When you use Wordpress to manage your site and you write a new post Wordpress will then automatically notify a number of blog search engines on your behalf, such as Pingomatic, Technoratic, etc. This ping means your updates show up on the index of these websites and because Google crawls these services very frequently you often have your new content indexed in minutes. When I post a new blog post here Google comes and visits my site within a few seconds.And yes we run Wordpress for the blog, and Joomla for the rest of the site.
So how do we get around this with Joomla? The answer is in a great little extension called Easy Ping for Joomla. This is a free Plugin created by Viviendo Linux. With this plugin installed each new content item you publish will result in the plugin pinging the engines you have configured in the plugin parameters.
By default the plugin comes with a number of sites already in the ping list but I recommend adding a few more for best results.
You can use this great ping list from MacKinven.
Simply navigate to your Extensions > Plugin Manager and select System – Easy Ping
In the parameters enter the ping list from MacKinven.com above and you are done! You can overwrite the ones that are listed by default as shown in the screen shot.
Joomulus 2.0 – More Simple Yet More Powerful
After many many months and little time we’ve finally refined and simplified the Joomulus flash tag cloud. The latest version of wp cumulus for Joomla is available now.
I’d like to introduce Joomulus 2.0!
Now there are still improvements we are planning, but this version works on all joomla 1.5 variations, and from the testing we’ve done it works on all major browsers as well.
Thanks to all the users who contributed to Joomulus (Flom I know you did a lot of work). In this new version we’ve done away with a lot of the parameters from the earlier versions; No more tags generated from content for one.
The main reason for this was to stop a major bug with PHP expending bytes allocated, which would stop the whole page from loading and leaving the viewer with a lovely PHP error.
The second reason to remove them, and people may not be aware of this, is the search link that all of the generated tags were associated with. This not only brings up usability issues with the user clicking on a tag then being confronted with a list of all content search results with that tag word in it (which is quite annoying). But it also brings up 404 errors, if you’re a user of Google’s webmaster tools you’ll see a lot of unreachable urls along the lines of:
index.php?option=com_search&searchword=joomlabear&searchphrase=exact&ordering=newest
Lastly, you didn’t have full control over what tags were generated.
These issues combined make for a fairly useless little tool. A: it’s not really usable B: it doesn’t help search engines but rather impairs them. So the tag generation from content has been all together removed (also known as automatic read out).
We’re left now with one option, the user defined tags. This requires a little more work to set up but allows full control over the tag, what it links to, and the size at which it should appear. And because the XML process is pretty much the same, but requires even MORE set up with ftp access, the parameter tag options was the way to go.
So after creating an efficient, to-the -point module, scrapping unnecessary parameters, we still had the IE issue to go.
And if you weren’t aware of it the IE issue was fairly major. It was worse than the PHP memory issue, the viewer was confronted with a wicked error and the page just wouldn’t load? I had thought the error was some where in the previous 300 lines of code; After refining the module to just under 100 lines of code I was still stumped by the issue.
Going back to basics I went to SWFObject Google group, and the old SWFObject forums….. then the posts went by and I still couldn’t find the issue. My brother had told me about the defer=’defer’ attribute that is now apart of XHTML specifications. This hints to the browser that the javascript doesn’t create content therefore delaying the execution until after the page loads. So I tried it and a burst of excitement/satisfaction arose in me as the page started to load.
But then a new error occurred and the page went blank….. my heart sank, frustration swelled.
But still progress was made. Looking at the page source on IE6 a bazaar line of code was left <script id=__ie_ondomload defer=true src=://><\/script> was all that was in the page. Going back to Google and searching for “__ie_ondomload” brought up some pages I hadn’t viewed before, and sure enough others had experienced this problem.
This was a line of code inserted by SWFObject when detecting the browser and which method of embedding to use. It was a known issue for the developers and they’d recently updated this in SWFObject 2.2.
So I updated Joomulus from 2.1 to 2.2 and again the results were looking good, until crash, burn, IE6 fell on another one of it’s 1001 hurdles, what a surprise.
I was starting to doubt the effectiveness of this method of embedding .swf’s. But everything I’ve read would suggest otherwise, Google is behind it and Adobe. So why me? Why was this such and issue and where was the fix? Was I really that noobish that I couldn’t get the most recommended method of embedding swf’s to work?
So I started from scratch again with a basic HTML page and any old swf file, it worked fine, not an error in/on site. I’d read a few forum posts of people having issues with IE errors, when the problem had been using an absolute path to the .js file. I’d been using the full URL the entire time though, in the basic HTML page and in the Joomla module?
The answer lies in the XHTML compliant <base> tag which Joomla uses. I found when adding a <base> to my basic HTML page errors were flying again in IE6. After reading forum posts on the topic I had a fleeting thought that people would just have to hack into Joomla and remove the base tag…. buts this is not only unintelligent, unpractical, it’s right pain in the arse.
The base tag uses a compliant method of closing which is called a self closing tag <base href=”http://joomlabear.com/” />. The self closing part is the final forward slash the comes before the closing of the opening tag. A better example is a hr <hr /> or a br <br />, if these were normal HTML tags they would look like <hr></hr> or <br></br>. It’s this self closing nature that IE can’t seem to interpret. Not only can it not interpret it but it crashes totally when used with SWFObject.
So after hours of frustration and cursing Mircosoft IE, the solution for all browsers is in IE ‘if statements’ that I’ll have you know were developed to allow alternative solutions for IE known issues. They actually developed IE with the ability to pick on specific HTML comments, that’s saying something. Here it is the solution for Joomulus or any swf being embedded with SWFObject on a page using a <base> tag
<!–[if IE]></base><![endif]–>
Thats it, IE is now satisfied with a old school traditional closing tag element.
Strange how something that simple can cause huge aggravation. And here we have Joomulus 2.0.
I hope anyone out there experiencing similar issues might benefit from this.
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!
