What are SEF URLs?

The pages which are easily found by search engines are considered as a good Search Engine Friendly websites. SEF URLs means “Search Engine Friendly” URLs, Joomla 1.5 provides three different options to build SEF URLs.

Step by Step procedure on how we can achieve SEF URLs through Joomla:

• 1. Firstly, login to your administrative panel that is http://www.xyz.com/administrator/index.php
• 2. In the dashboard page, click on “Global Configuration” Icon
• 3. Which will take you to the “Global Configuration” page, towards your right you can see a panel by named “SEO Settings”. By default, all the respective options would be to “No”
• 4. Firstly, for the “Search Engine Friendly URLs” option, go head and choose “Yes”, by choosing “YES” option – the URL would be changed to something like “http://www.xyz.com/xy/index.php/home/” – If you see you can see “index.php” in the URL [How we can remove this from the URL, for this follow the steps below]
• 5. Secondly, choose “Yes” for “Use Apache mod_rewrite” second option provided, this will remove /index.php/ from the URL only when if you can rename the htaccess.txt file in the root folder to .htaccess. The above scenario would remove /index.php/ from the URL.
• 6. Thirdly, if you want add suffix to your URLs like for example “http://www.xyz.com/xy/home.html” – you have to choose the third option for this, that is choose “Yes” to “Add suffix to URLs” option provided in SEO Settings.

So, the SEO Settings should look like below once you are done. Make all the options to “Yes”.

Hope the steps might help you in removing /index.php/ from the respective URLs.

If your lovable friend is staying in another country and you would like to know his present time at his location, it is easy to find out the same – just open Google Search Engine and type “Time in CA USA” that is, you are asking Google what is the present time now in California [USA]. Google is smart enough, it shows the exact time of the respective location. And If you want to find my time, then just go on type in the search field as “Time in Hyderabad India”. Its cool tip right….. Google will helps you in all the way. Cheers to Google….

Really rounded corners play an important role to make a web application look pretty cool, maximum all web portals use rounded corners to get a great look to there web portals. This jQuery plugin has got many available patterns like Round, Bevel, Notch, Bite, Cool, Sharp, Slide, Jut, Curl, Tear, Fray, Wicked, Sculpt, Long, Dog Ear, Dog2, Dog3 and many more with different size. You can give your own size to get a specific corner size. You can see more at this location – http://malsup.com/jquery/corner/

Rounded Corner

Introduction:

“Accessibility” which place a key role while implementing any application either it might be a Desktop Application, Web Application, Web Site related applications, since this feature makes an application accessible to the people with a disability to view, navigate the respective application either it might be a desktop applications (or) web applications. We have so many screen readers available for Windows or for any other Operating Systems, which helps us in developing a good accessible website or application. While developing a web related project or any other project, we need to implement Accessibility features into that – since this will help most of the disabled people around the world. For example: If you look at Windows Operating System, it has got the accessibility feature, people who are disabled can access or navigate through the Windows Products very easily without any problem.

This article high-lights about the Accessibility of Web Sites, if you want to make a good and awesome website with accessibility features then for this to implement and for testing the same you must need some trouble shooting tools right? yeah! just I googled and caught some Accessibility related add-ons for Firefox. Where in which you can test your web applications and can whether the respective application is fully accessible are not. Hope the below list of Accessibility add-ons might help you in building a good accessible website / web application.

Accessibility related add-ons for firefox:

1. Firefox Accessibility Extension – by Jon Gunderson, Illinois Center for Information Accessibility

Support web developers and people with disabilities in accessing and testing web resources for accessibility features.

2. Accessibilityenabled by L. David Baron

An about page, about:accessibilityenabled, to show whether accessibility API support is…

3. TAW3 with a click by Fundación CTIC

Web Accessibility Test. You can have an idea, with a single click, of how accesible web sites are.

4. ocawatoolbar by Urbilog

Audit accessibility of your web site.

5. Accessibar by Edan Kemelman

Accessibility toolbar enabling easy manipulation of web page display and text-to-speech output…

6. Qompliance by kyenos

Worldspace – Deque Section 508, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (”WCAG 1, 2, and 3″) Compliance Tool. Now supports WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA

7. N-Abled Web Accessibility Toolbar by N-Abled-Dev

Provides FireFox with accessibility to the widest possible audience, regardless of disability, capability or technology.

8. Fangs Screen Reader Emulator by Peter Krantz

Renders a text version of a web page similar to screen reader output. Helps developers find accessibility issues…

9. WAVE Toolbar by WebAIM

WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Toolbar

10. WAT Q/A Extension by Cédric Trévisan

Free extension for web accessibility testing

11. Herdict Web by Jeffrey Licht

View and report on site accessibility to the Herdict Web project (http://www.herdict.org) at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society

If you want to install com_updater in Joomla 1.5 having PHP version 4.x installed, then this might not be compatible with PHP Version 4.x. Here we have two solutions either we need to go and upgrade your PHP version to latest that is as of now PHP 5 (or) just go head and shift to other extension that is eXtplorer, this is compatible with Joomla 1.5 and PHP v4.x.

Here is the link for eXtplorer extension (you can find the same at Joomlacode.org – http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomlaxplorer/frs/) were you can download it and install into your sever directly from Extension Manager in Joomla Administration Panel.

Hi Readers, are you a good website designer? (or) your site has got good look and feel? and you think that your site is awesome enough?, if yes! then here is the right opportunity to participate and win an iPod Nano – yes! I mean iPod Nano! Awesome right, then what are you waiting for – if you feel that your site is awesome enough then just go-head and submit your site. Here is the URL where you need to submit your site – http://www.thecssawards.com/.

For the Time Line you can view this page for your reference, nicely explained – http://www.thecssawards.com/submit.php, The winner will not only get name, fame, recognition, prestige and media presence as well. I would like to say, if you are a good designer and your website is awesome then just go-head and apply for the same.

Recently, I was working on one Joomla template. I was little disappointed with my menu, since with the default template (rhuk_milkyway) – I could not find any dropdown menu with this template which could be more flexible to my design. Just I googled (which is my favorite search-engine ever) and found one awesome solution for the menu which I have created. Its very much compatible with Internet Explorer 6.0 as well. I just followed the steps which I has been mentioned in the website & just worked on my custom CSS accordingly and my dropdown menu is ready. Do you want to know the website which has solved my issue? here it is – its docs.joomla.org its a Joomla Documentation official website. Here is the article which I was talking about – Creating a CSS Drop down Menu

The above website, has helped me a lot, hope this might help you as well. Have look at the other articles if you want to use Sucker Fish Menu

• Suckerfish combined with the extended menu module
• Suckerfish combined with the default Joomla! menu module

By going through the above articles, below are the screenshots of menu which I have done to my Joomla Template, its really awesome… right?

Recently, when I was working on a Joomla project, I forgot how to install Joomla in XAMPP Server. Before installing I downloaded the XAMPP Server from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html, then I have downloaded the latest version of Joomla from http://www.joomla.org/, after installing my XAMPP Server, I have created a new database through my XAMPP MySql – and followed the below video accordingly to install Joomla into XAMPP.

Install Joomla in XAMPP

I would like to thank the Author slogen123 for sharing his valuable expertise on installing Joomla. In this video, there was an article on how we can install Joomla 1.5 with XAMPP – the title is like “Installing XAMPP & Joomla! 1.5“

Watch Installing XAMPP & Joomla! 1.5 in Entertainment Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

And below is the Step-by-step installation process
(by http://www.miguelsanchez.com)

1. Install XAMPP. Service section: check “Install Apache as service” and “Install MySQL as service”.
2. Extract Joomla! ZIP package and copy files and folders included to: (XAMPP installation directory)/htdocs/(yourproject)/
3. Go to http://localhost/xampp/index.php on your web browser and select “phpMyAdmin” from the left menu.
   • Enter a name for the database that will be used by Joomla! on the “Create new database” field.
   • Go to “Server: localhost” on the upper breadcrumb and press then the “Privileges” tab.
   • Select “Add a new user”. Enter your desired username+password and “localhost” for host field. If you’re going to use that user for administration tasks you can check all global privileges.
4. Go to http://localhost/(yourproject) on your web browser to start Joomla! installator.
   • Select your language for the installation process.
   • Check that all the minimum requierements are working properly.
   • Read the licence if you feel bored
   • On the database configuration page, enter username+password and database name previously defined. Also “localhost” for host name field.
   • I won’t setup an FTP file system layer.
   • On the main configuration page, it’s time to give a name to your website. You must enter an e-mail address and a password that will be used by “admin” user. There’s an options area below for migration procedures. You can also press “Install sample data” button if you don’t want to start your Joomla! project from scratch.
5. Now Joomla! is installed and ready. Don’t forget to remove the installation directory. You’ll find your frontend at http://localhost/(yourproject) and access your administration area at http://localhost/(yourproject)/administrator, with user “admin” and password set on the previous step.

More information:

• Joomla! documentation.
• Joomla! quickstar video-tutorials.

Free Guide

Sun Microsystems, gives us a free guide on using Open Source to Develop Web Applications, which explains about Business benefits.

Content Courtesy: Sun Microsystems

The Guide to Using Open Source Software to Develop Web Applications clearly explains the business benefits and gives practical advice to help developers choose the optimum combination of open source software products and implement a solution that comes with the added assurance of enterprise-class support.

What the guide covers:

• The need for dynamic web applications
• Choosing between proprietary and open source
• Selecting the right open source platform
• Overview of open source projects
• The benefits of the GlassFish Portfolio
• How to get started
• Customer case studies

If you would like to know more about the same, you can view at the white papers which they have published and even you can download your own copy – Free Whitepaper

Introduction:

Today I came up with another article which has been posted in packtpub.com, this article helps you in developing a simple and awesome Item Selector using jQuery. I came up with my own design and icons, written CSS accordingly to place and adjust them accordingly.

Here is the article where I have posted – http://www.packtpub.com/article/simple-item-selector-using-jquery

Below are the respective snap shots of the same, For your reference preview is available at this location – http://www.developersnippets.com/snippets/jquery/item_selector/item_selector.html and you can download the source code from this location – http://www.developersnippets.com/snippets/jquery/item_selector/item_selector.zip