SECOND EDITION OF JOOMLADAY™ KENYA

August 02 2013

JoomlaDay Kenya will hold a JoomlaDay on Friday, August 02^nd, 2013 for local Joomla Users and enthusiasts. The event, which will be held at 88Mph Startup Garage, Ngong Road – Nairobi Kenya, will help Web designers, Web administrator, Software developers and Joomla enthusiasts grow their skills, connect with other Joomla users, and learn innovative techniques to assist their business online.

Joomla is one of the world's most popular content management systems (CMS) with over 3% of all Websites on the Internet use Joomla, Ranging from Individuals, SMEs, Large Businesses and Public organizations all over the world to easily create a huge variety of web sites and applications.

The Joomla Community is large and international, with over 600,000 registered users on the official forums and over 225,000 people registered on joomlacode.org where developers work together to improve Joomla and create extensions. In addition to individual developers

JoomlaDays are a unique opportunity for the Joomla! Communities to connect, learn, share, and innovate. Official recognition of JoomlaDay Kenya is provided by Open Source Matters and Joomla! http://events.joomla.org/

Joomla! Usability and Accessibility – Is Joomla!^TM user friendly to persons with disability?

Joomla! Day Kenya offered a good opportunity for the Joomla!^TM community in Kenya to Interact and share their experiences and challenges while using and extending the most widely used CMS.

Interesting questions come up and were tackled by various experts and enthusiast alike, of all the questions one particularly captured my attention, “Is Joomla! usable by persons with Disability?”  This question was not well exploited and satisfactorily answered so I tried digging up some info about it and here is what I found out.

First things first, let’s define the terminology used herein:

• Usability – This may refer to the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use. (ISO). In simple words is it easy to use to achieve a particular goal.
• Accessibility – This is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible. (Wikipedia). In simple words is it easy to get information from it.

Now let’s focus these two aspects of user friendliness to Joomla. My main area of focus will be the front-end (back-end and administration will come later).

]]> shedyk@gmail.com (Shadrack Serem) Joomkenya Blog Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:27:13 +0000 http://www.joomkenya.com/blog/15-joomladay-nairobikenya-2012.html http://www.joomkenya.com/blog/15-joomladay-nairobikenya-2012.html

The first ever Joomla!Day™  Kenya will be held at NaiLab Nairobi  Bishop Magua Centre, 4th Floor Ngong Road .

Excerpt from http://news.lehsys.com

Many of us have found Joomla to be one of the best options for building websites quickly and easily for a variety of industries. This is because it’s ease of use, has many plugins, and its scalability has earned great applause. Unfortunately, Joomla is a little backward SEO wise, and makes it difficult for your content to rank well. Never fear, we have listed here 10 great plugins we have used on clients sites and seen great results. So make 2010 a year of SEO zen with your Joomla website. Please keep in mind that these plugins are somewhat exclusive, while some can be combined, others cannot. Proceed with caution.

1. RS SEO- This great component does a number of invaluable SEO tasks including: crawl your website and index all the pages, modify the Meta Keywords, Meta description and Title on the fly, grade each page for SEO effectiveness, create Google and Yahoo! sitemaps, constantly monitor your competitors and compare them to you, monitor important keyword positions, and set permanent redirects for old links.

2. iJoomla SEO- Another great full featured component with a plethora of SEO features including: position of keywords in Google, use of h1, h2, h3 tags instead of contentheading tag, individual metatag control per page, automatic linking based on keyword, 301 redirects, ability to add nofollows to links (or leave dofollow, if you prefer), and image seo optimization.

3. SEF Service Map 2 (with PingBack system)- This component creates a complete XML sitemap of your site which it then uses to actively report (ping) new or modified items to Google, Yahoo, and other services. (Pinging is one of the tools that makes WordPress so AWESOME for SEO!) Thanks to that, indexing robots (spiders) will visit your site much more often and the site can index itself without your further activity. Make sure to sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.

4. sh404SEF This component adds search engine friendly url’s to Joomla but is much more robust than the built in SEF. sh404SEF lets you create unlimited short URLs for any page, remove duplicate URLs, customize the page title and page description, automatically emphasize all your article titles with “Heading tags,” spam and hacker management, and IP blocking. It also works with or without .htaccess support. ]]> info@joomkenya.com (Administrator) Joomkenya Blog Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:15:15 +0000 http://www.joomkenya.com/blog/12-google-friend-connect.html http://www.joomkenya.com/blog/12-google-friend-connect.html In an already too social web craze, companies like Google are working round the clock to improve their user interaction and experience. Google announced the integration of Google Friend Connect (GFC) with Joomla! and Drupal.

This provides alot of social features without any neccesary need for programming skills. "Even site owners without programming experience can add these plugins," writes Mauro González in Google's Social Web blog post. "Now that Friend Connect is integrated with these popular open source CMS platforms, site owners can make registration easier for users and offer them a set of social features - all without writing a single line of code."

According to commentator Jake Ryson, the modules can be used to allow website managers to build their own submission forms for content they want to host.

Writing for his ZDNet blog, he explained: "I'm in the midst of building a Joomla site for my web design training business, and I'd like to add some extra form fields: duration, price and level.

"I'm using the JEvents Joomla extension and it just needs extending a little bit."

Mr Ryson noted that a few months ago, he did not understand what CCK meant, but now found himself needing one in order to maximize website performance.

Last month, Christopher Dawson, a member of the Internet Press Guild, told ZDNet that the Joomla content management system can be used to make websites look more attractive to the reader.

Written by Tim Dunton

Global Gold

Joomla! has been very useful and efficient in its purpose as a CMS, having a download exceeding 10Million. With Joomla! 1.5 having taken the user experiances to a whole new level and the coming of Joomla! 1.6 with great new feature(like the much anticipated ACl), Its time to celebrate this achievements

by Nominating Joomla! for Best PHP Open Source CMS!.