the JoomlaWorks blog

Joomla! forks you may have never heard of

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:08:00 -0700

As I was cleaning up my bookmarks today (they've reached around 5MBs!), along with some Joomla! gems and memories, I found a list of Joomla! forks I kept...

I bet you never know those existed. Some are still active, some are dead. Check them out...

And in case you don't know where this all started, check Mambo.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Cloud.com, recently acquired by Citrix for $250m is running on Joomla! & K2

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 07:53:00 -0700

I'm really proud today for our K2 project.

I'm proud for 2 reasons. First of all, K2 is used by one more big company. And it's not just any company. Citrix/Cloud.com are top at what they do. Secondly, it's because Cloud.com just got acquired by Citrix for a whopping $250 million deal.

It's probably the first ever acquisition deal we've ever heard of that magnitude that one way or another involves Joomla! in. And not just that, K2 is at the heart of Cloud.com :)

Check out their site: http://cloud.com

Permalink | Leave a comment »

"Getting serious" with Google Analytics event tracking - know your users' behavior

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:11:00 -0700

A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a website in which the source code included some funky tracking events of Google Analytics (GA) inside the site's links... To be honest, I didn't know at that point Google Analytics could be extended like that, so I dug deeper to learn more.

If you're not an SEO expert using buzzwords like ROI, SEM, CPR etc., you're probably using GA for browsing page views, visitor count, browser percentages etc. Turns out, GA offers at a "basic level" the option to track unique events on your website, e.g. a click on a link or a file download. Which makes statistics viewing way more interesting...

Consider this simple example: getk2.org has around 20 links that rarely change. I wanted to know how many people download K2 from this particular website (and not some third party source), how many people click on the documentation, how many get the SVN version of K2 and so on...

Having read the manual over at GA help, I came down to some basic event tracking usage with GA on getk2.org. The goal was to see for the first time how users "behave" inside getk2.org and not just how many come in. GA event tracking organizes results in this manner: Categories, actions, labels. That translates to specific "pages" (or some entire section in your site, e.g. Sports news), things that we anticipate users to do (e.g. click on a link or download a file) and finally, names of the actual links being clicked (e.g. "K2 main file download"). If you're not lost, bare with me for a sec...

First off, I only wanted to track the K2 homepage (getk2.org) so I used 1 "category" in my events: "K2 Homepage"

Secondly, I divided my anticipated "behaviors" (the "actions" in GA lingo) into just 2: visit (for links) and download (for file downloads).

Thirdly, I labeled all links to be tracked in a way that makes sense to me... So the K2 download button is labelled as "Stable release". I don't need to mark it as "Stable release download", because I've already assigned to that link the right "action" (Download).

So I prepare these "onclick" JS events, to add them into my homepage links... well, the most important ones... And I let GA track those event for around 2 monts...

To give you an example of such an event:

1	<a href="http://domain.com/about.html" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'My homepage', 'Visit', 'About Us']);">About Us</a>

Now I come back to GA and go (on the left sidebar) to Content >> Event Tracking and I can see how my visitors behaved... Well, here's a surprise! I didn't know so many people where downloading the SVN release! Needless to say, the results where very encouraging! I won't go into detail, but it's worth trying this on your own.

If you want a solution that hooks up GA tracking events in Joomla, I can't say I know any specific... If you do, please let everyone know in the comments.

But it should not be difficult to implement these events, e.g. in K2 attachment downloads or in other components... Maybe a plugin could also attach such events using JS automatically onto any link that is a file (e.g. PDF, ODF etc.). Or a combination of JS and Joomla PHP to use e.g. the "title" of the link to create the "label", the file extension in links to determine the "action" and the current page (by Joomla) to assign the "Category".

I hope you enjoyed this small introduction into GA tracking events. You can see how to attach these events by examining the source code in: http://getk2.org

Permalink | Leave a comment »

JoomlaDay Greece 2011 a success!

Mon, 30 May 2011 15:20:00 -0700

More than 600 hundred people came past the doors of Danaos in Athens, the weekend of 28 and 29 May, 2011.

Thanks to all the visitors, the speakers and the #jd11gr sponsors for making JoomlaDay Greece 2011 (the first ever JoomlaDay in Greece!) such a successful event!

See you all in JoomlaDay Greece 2012!

Permalink | Leave a comment »

F*ck you, pay me - a must see for professionals in web design

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 16:38:00 -0700

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

JoomlaDay Greece 2011 - May 28-29, 2011

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 05:45:00 -0700

The first (ever) official JoomlaDay Greece 2011 event is coming May 28-29, 2011.

2 days, 30 presentations, great foreign and domestic speakers such as Johan Janssens (Nooku), Alex Kempkens (JoomFish), Max Milbers (Virtuemart), Nick Dionysopoulos and many more (inc. yours truly) in a unique Joomla! event!

More soon on http://joomladay.gr

Permalink | Leave a comment »

New Relic RPM: performance analysis tool for PHP (and how to install it on a cPanel based server)

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 03:47:00 -0800

New Relic RPM is a SAAS profiling/troubleshooting tool for your websites/web apps. Or as New Relic's website mentions:

Ensure the health and availability of your production PHP web apps with New Relic RPM. Monitor overall application response time and throughput including memcache, database and external services. Then go deeper into individual web transactions and database calls to MySQL, PostgresSQL, and any PDO-supported database all the way down to SQL statements.

You basically install an "agent" on your server and this agent gathers data from your sites and applications, which then sends over to the web service. To see the analysis that New Relic RPM performs you just login to the New Relic RPM website. Some pretty impressive stuff actually on slow scripts, long slow queries and more.

Many known "web apps" use it already, so it's worth a try, even at the free "Lite" plan (which also gives 8 days of the full features of the "gold" plan).

Installing New Relic RPM on your LAMP server is pretty easy. Detailed installation instructions for PHP can be found here.

If you're on a cPanel based server (usually running CentOS), the agent installation is fine and dandy. But cPanel will not pick up the agent's php module installation path unless you specifically tell it so... So here's what you need to do:

Install the New Relic RPM agent according to the official documentation.
UPDATE May 20th, 2011: The new New Relic RPM installer (as mentioned in the official documentation) will install the newrelic.so inside all cPanel PHP extension folders, so you don't need to do the symlinks in strikethrough below (original implementation).
The newrelic.so module will have a symlink inside /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX/ (where 200XXXXX can be e.g. 20060613 if your PHP version is 5.2.x)
If you're running your server in suPHP or FastCGI "mode", cPanel is most probably using the /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX/ path for PHP extensions/modules. So all you need to do is create a symlink for the newrelic.so symlink mentioned previously inside this folder. Logged in as root in your server via SSH, simply type:
$ ln -s /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX/newrelic.so /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX/newrelic.so
Make sure you replace 200XXXXX with the actual folder on your system, depending on your PHP version.
Now that cPanel's PHP can "see" the newrelic.so module, all we need to do is edit our PHP's configuration in cPanel to add the newrelic.so reference. Go to Service Configuration >> PHP Configuration Editor, switch to the "advanced mode", locate the line "extension_dir" and simply enter in the form field "newrelic.so" (without the quotes - if there are other .so file references there, don't forget to add a comma and then write newrelic.so).
Save your PHP configuration (at the bottom).
Restart Apache.

That's it. Data will now start gathering in the New Relic RPM dashboard.

Happy analyzing!

UPDATES

If you wish to run reporting on a per domain basis, e.g. track domain1.com and domain2.com differently, here's a cool trick you can do:

- If your server is executing PHP in suPHP "mode", create a php.ini file inside the root path of each domain and place this directive in:
newrelic.appname = "My domain name"

- If your server is executing PHP in mod_php "mode", create (if you don't already have one) a .htaccess file inside the root path of each domain and place this directive in:
php_value newrelic.appname "My domain name"

- If your server is executing PHP in FastCGI/CGI "mode", you can either hack your way around with stupid .fcgi/.cgi files in the cgi-bin and .htaccess weirdness (to get per domain php directives to work) OR you can simply install the cool "htscanner" PECL extension, which allows FastCGI based PHP environments to execute php directives on a per domain/folder basis...

If you try to install htscanner from the PECL module installer, you'll stumble on errors, because cPanel does not yet allow beta versions of PECL modules to be installed. So you do it manually over SSH, but using the command line PECL installer...

Execute the following commands logged in as root:
$ yum install pcre-devel
$ pear upgrade-all
$ pecl install htscanner-beta

These commands will install htscanner.so (version beta 1.0 at the time of writing) inside /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX (where 200XXXXX can be e.g. 20060613 if your PHP version is 5.2.x). If your PHP configuration is set to execute PHP extensions/modules inside the /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX, simply create a symlink of htscanner.so to that folder:

$ ln -s /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX/htscanner.so /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX/htscanner.so

Go to the PHP configuration page in cPanel/WHM, click "advanced mode" and add the htscanner.so reference to the extensions_dir field (like you did before with the newrelic.so module). Save and restart Apache to pick up the changes. By default, htscanner will look for php_value directives in .htaccess files. If you want it to look at .htscanner files instead (my preference), you need to edit your php.ini file directly via SSH and add these lines at the bottom of the file:

[HTSCANNER]
htscanner.config_file = ".htscanner"
;htscanner.default_docroot =   "/"
;htscanner.default_ttl =   "300"
;htscanner."stop_on_error" =   "Off"

Save the file and restart Apache.

Htscanner is now ready and you can execute php_value directives inside .htaccess or .htscanner if you did the modification above. To conclude, enter this line (as in the previous example for mod_php):

php_value newrelic.appname "My domain name"

New Relic RPM will now pick up domain (or folder) names for all scripts executed within them.

An easy-peasy way to profile your sites' performance, while at the same time separate domains or folder for better reporting and readability.

Check the screenshot below, listing joomlaworks.gr, getk2.org and the entire server hosting these sites:

Being a performance junkie, I've found a new toy!

P.S. Drupal & Wordpress already have related extensions hooking up the CMS to New Relic RPM's API for better integration. Won't be long until we see a Joomla! implementation as well ;)

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Why you should avoid using /index.php in your site's logo

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 11:02:00 -0800

A common error most people do when finishing up a webiste with Joomla! is forgetting to change their site's logo link from e.g. domain.com/index.php to just domain.com.

This usually happens for one of the following reasons:

People add an index.html placeholder page in their site so the actual site is not visible while they're developing it.
People add something like Logo because they work on a development (aka local) server so they cannot add the actual domain
People just use the /index.php link cause this is probably what they read in some Joomla! tutorial.

In reality, this is bad SEO-wise for your site. You see, Google assumes domain.com/ and domain.com/index.php are 2 different pages. So without knowing, you easily screw up your site's SEO potential with the most important search engine today...

So, don't forget to fix your site logo's link when you go live, as it's the most hit "home" button.

A better way to implement this is by using this short php code as your link:

1	<a href="<?php echo $this->baseurl; ?>/" title="My site's homepage">Your logo</a>

The above code will always print the right path to your site's root, no matter if you're on a dev server or live.

Alternatively, you can add this in your .htaccess file (if you're using it of course):

# Redirect /index.php to / - will also clear /index.php/something to /something RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\ /index\.php(/[^\ ]*)?\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.php(/(.*))?$ /$2 [R=301,L]

Use the above code with caution as in some rare cases, it may break your site...

More .htaccess goodness here: http://snipt.net/fevangelou/custom-htaccess-rules-used-on-joomla-sites-we-build/

If you're feeling masochistic, you can always create a Google Analytics account and specifically tell Google that your site's root is index.php so it won't consider domain.com/ and domain.com/index.php as 2 different pages...

Permalink | Leave a comment »

HTML5 Validator Bookmarklet

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:00:42 -0800

HTML5 Validator Bookmarklet

Couldn't find one, so I made one on my own (not some ginormous task, mind you...)

May come handy to others who are just diving into HTML5 web development.

Enjoy ;)

Permalink | Leave a comment »

K2 moving forward

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 04:50:00 -0800

The community of K2 has spoken through the poll I got up yesterday on the frontpage of the K2 Community website. An email was previously sent to all our members letting them know of this poll, as well as the reasons we chose to resolve into such a poll.

The verdict?

Existing K2 users are not rushing to jump to Joomla! 1.6, especially knowing it's got a limited life-cycle (up until July 2011). And this is normal.

What does that mean for K2?
It means the following 2 things:
1. We will proceed and launch v2.5 of K2 for Joomla! 1.5 only within February 2011. New features and especially performance improvements of up to 500% make this release a very important one to existing websites, especially the most high traffic ones...
2. We will proceed to port K2 for Joomla! 1.6 and release v2.6 within April (or hopefully sooner) so new Joomla! 1.6 users make use of the incredibly valuable content features K2 adds to Joomla!.

In the meantime, we will explore other options as well, like perhaps a bundled Joomla! & K2 distribution based on Nooku Server. Johan Janssens has given us his "blessings", so if time permits, we will explore this option as well.

What all that means?
It mean K2 has a vibrant and high-level community of people who value their content and know their priorities. Evolution itself demands we move forward (I never said the opposite either way).

So we ARE moving forward, supporting both Joomla! 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 etc. but in realistic timeframes.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the previous blog post with their comments or even via Twitter or other social services.

Thanks to all the K2 users that voted as well.

A snapshot of the results (via PollDaddy) follows...

http://polldaddy.com/poll/4504962/?view=results

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Why we're not porting K2 to Joomla! 1.6 (just yet), the life cycle of a release, Nooku Server and more

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 10:39:00 -0800

IMPORTANT NOTICE: A poll is now setup in the K2 Community for people to voice their opinion more properly

First, some facts...

Joomla! 1.6's life cycle is very short. Just 6 months. By July 2011, the Joomla! team will end development and proceed to releasing Joomla! v1.7.

This is very disturbing for many big projects like K2, considering all the big changes that 1.6 has introduced in its framework (language files, content elements, classes, functions, ACL etc. etc.) and the unnecessary workload added (see language files going back to Joomla! 1.0 days), especially for free extensions like K2, Virtuemart and many more...

Many developers have expressed doubts about 1.6. Jen Kramer also nailed it in her recent blog post: Joomla 1.6 and Beyond: Should I upgrade? Should I build my new sites in it?

So did Andy Miller of RocketTheme fame on: Should I upgrade to Joomla 1.6?

Back to the title of this post...

Why we're not porting K2 for Joomla! 1.6 (just yet)...

First and foremost... What does 1.6 bring to Joomla! end users aside the new version number? It brings ACL (damn acronyms), nested level categories for core Joomla! articles (but just that, don't expect tags, comments or other integrated stuff), sub-template overrides, it's removed the useful Polls component (but the VERY useful Weblinks and Newsfeeds components are still there - please don't laugh)... For real...

Let's see what K2 and Joomla! 1.5 have compared to 1.6. Well, it's like a whole new CMS! But there's no ACL, some will say... Ok then, for the 100 people of the 10 million who're gonna download 1.6 in the coming months, and actually make use of the ACL... guys, there's a solution for you in K2 and J1.5. You probably don't need to re-do your entire site (which costs money and time)...

Why? Let's face it... when you give access to your backend, you give it to people you trust, your close partners. Joomla! 1.5's ACL is pretty good for that. "Managers" for content writers and "admins"/"super admins" for a couple of people who control the site. It's worked amazingly well for years now... For 99,999% of people, ACL is not required in the backend if you think about it.

But you'll probably need ACL for the frontend and control who gets to see (or input) what. If you're using K2, it's got you covered already. You provide "frontend editing access", which allows people to input/edit content in your site with a proper ACL system provided by K2... A "done deal" for many popular Joomla! sites like Gazzetta.gr or even the Joomla! Magazine.

Now that 1.6 is out and to further prove our point on "practical ACL", we plan to roll either a new component or a system plugin to allow Joomla! 1.5 and K2 users to control even "content viewing" in the frontend for guests or registered users. Maybe we'll even work on a cool solution for the backend of Joomla! 1.5 as well...

Still not convinced? Here are some questions to consider:

- How many popular extensions are available or will be available for 1.6 until 1.6 development is ceased for 1.7... We see many big ones not even 1.5 native up until now (cough, VM, cough). Support for 1.6 is probably a joke, not cause the extension dev is not capable of the conversion, but because 6 months are a small timeframe for FREE extensions, maintained by people for no compensation in their FREE time.

- How many extensions would practically make use of an ACL system. Most that require ACL already got it built in (see K2 or forum components). You probably don't need ACL for Polls or Weblinks, right?

- Would you invest money in developing a site now based on 1.6 and see it become obsolete by July 2011? If 1.6 changed so much from 1.5, why won't 1.7 do the same?

What about supporting Joomla! 1.6 in general?

There's no doubt for that. We will support Joomla! 1.6 for our commercial and free (smaller) extensions, but it's because they're small and therefore easy to convert/maintain. I built the 1.6 version of Simple Image Gallery v2.0 in just one day...

So what next?

We go on with 1.5 for K2. It's a solid platform to develop websites and with the right combination of extensions, it can drive websites that are visited by millions of people per month, when Drupal or Wordpress would sweat the least (without a massive server cluster that is, haha)...

But there is something really new coming along, something that does redefine many elements for developers, which in turn would benefit end-users. Enter "Nooku Server"!

Nooku Server is a Joomla! 1.5 distribution, slimmed down from legacy code, better caching, packaged with the powerful Nooku framework, from the man who already built the Joomla! 1.5 framework. We see Nooku Server, we see what amazing extensions people have built for Nooku and Joomla! 1.5 (see NinjaBoard, Anahita etc.) and we believe there is a better ecosystem for K2 already available.

We already plan the migration of our SMF forum to Ninjaboard and maybe the new site is powered by Nooku Server by the end of the month. The Nooku Server approach is far more realistic, as a) does not demand any code change to 1.5 extensions and b) offers a powerful framework if you want to extend programming to new levels. And I hear something will be arranged for ACL as well.

Sorry folks, but unless something significantly changes on how Joomla! perceives the life cycle of a version, we do not plan to port K2 to Joomla! 1.6. It's wasted time for a product which will last 6 months. It will be at least 40 days down the drain for us.

I know it's a tough decision, but websites are not desktops to release a new major version every 6 months, like Ubuntu does... Websites take time to build... Proper websites (to which 1.6 features are targetted ;) ) take from 30 to 90 days to build...

What's your say? ;)

You can leave a comment or place your vote in the poll I created regarding K2 and Joomla! 1.6 in the K2 Community website: http://community.getk2.org/#pollFor16

UPDATES

1. There seems to be a "response" for the Joomla! team. Kind of bashes extension devs in my opinion, which is very unfair, especially to other projects who are not even now native to J!1.5 but have a huge user base... K2 is 100% native to Joomla! 1.5 and can easily be ported to 1.6 in a relaxed timeframe of a month. Other projects need to re-write everything. Our decision however is based on "practical" terms and features, not version numbers.

2. Nooku Server is now available to download and test. It's Joomla! 1.5, slimmed down, legacy code out, junk stuff out, includes the powerful Nooku framework, amazingly fast admin backend and a lot more... Since this is a release for testing, the Nooku team allows you to connect to their dev server and download the release via SVN. But to make life easier, I created an automated script that will grab the latest SVN snapshot and create a distribution ready to be installed. Grab Nooku Server 0.7 alpha here: http://nuevvo.com/nookuserver/

3. I see people divided in 2 groups already. So to be fair to everyone, a poll is now setup in the K2 Community for people to voice their opinion more properly.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

On the cover of Kathimerini's "K" magazine

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 04:18:00 -0800

The cover title translates to "young, innovative"... It was (admittedly) a surprise to have been interviewed for "K", the weekly magazine of Kathimerini (currently the most popular Greek newspaper). The article is about new tech companies/startups in Greece (although I don't consider ourselves a startup however). From left to right: Lefteris, Chiara (who also made all the amazing graphics you're looking at), your truly and Yiota. Still amazed we made it to the cover of "K"...

Props to George Tziralis for running OpenCoffee in Greece, which introduced many such companies/startups in the Greek "tech scene".

Update (Tuesday, Feb 1st, 2011): The inner pages of the article (in Greek)...

(by Natasha Blatsiou for "K" mag)

Permalink | Leave a comment »

So what's it gonna be Ning? Are you gonna deal with spam seriously or not?

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 06:12:00 -0800

Dear Ning...

This is an open letter to you from a PRO member running 2 communities with more than 50,000 members in total...

The situation with spam is slowly becoming unbearable and I'm not seeing any significant improvements to your antispam tools...

Really... I'm *this* close to moving away from Ning and going back to some "old school" self-hosted solution...

I have repeatedly requested you guys integrate better member searching filters (e.g. search and flag spam by email domain) and additional signup rules, so I can block all future spammers coming from the same domain and so on...

This time, it's the @yopmail.com domain spammers that are flooding our communities with dozens of thousands of spam blog posts...

Your supposed crowd-powered antispam mechanisms just don't seem to work in this case, as it's been more than 10 days that I constantly see spam blog posts from this particular domain I already mentioned.

So what's it gonna be Ning? Will you figure something out, or I'm I gonna just move to a self-hosted forum solution where I can properly filter out spammers?

A frustrated PRO member.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Install APC on a WHM/cPanel server (11.28+) the easy way and boost Joomla! performance!

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:45:00 -0800

If you run a popular Joomla! website on a powerful VPS or even dedicated server running WHM/cPanel, chance is you may have stumbled upon performance issues at some point...

Although improving Joomla!'s performance is a task that requires another lengthy post, I thought I'd just write a couple of words on improving one aspect of Joomla!'s performance quickly and efficiently: PHP execution by using the APC opcode caching module.

There are many tutorials out there covering how to install APC from command line (as root user), but none on how to install APC on a WHM/cPanel server "the easy way". And it's actually pretty easy provided your server is executing PHP in FastCGI mode (the most optimal setup). Default cPanel installations usually run PHP in suPHP mode, which does not allow APC to be installed. If you have full control of the server, you can use EasyApache in WHM to "rebuild" your system with PHP in FastCGI mode.

FastCGI mode is known to be a fast and secure way to run PHP on your server... FastCGI is also preferred compared to mod_php as it allows websites to execute with the user's permissions (like with suPHP) and as some claim, it's also faster than mod_php.

Assuming you have PHP in FastCGI mode running on your WHM/cPanel (version 11.28+) based server, there are 3 simple steps to install APC on your server:

1. Login as "root" user via SSH and run this command:

yum install pcre-devel

This will install some required dependencies for the next steps...

2. Login to WHM and navigate to "Service Configuration" >> "PHP Configuration Editor", then "Switch to Advanced Mode" and change under section "Core" and command "extension_dir" the PHP extensions path from "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX" to "/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX". 200XXXXX depends on the PHP version installed on your server. If it's PHP 5.2 you'll see 2006XXXX, if it's PHP 5.3 you'll see 2009XXXX. Save and restart Apache.

IMPORTANT: If the above change causes problems on your server, that may occur because you already have other PHP extensions that use the default cPanel PHP extensions install location. In that case, simply create a "symlink" (a shortcut) of "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX" to "/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX". Do that by executing the following via SSH as root user:

ln -s /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-200XXXXX

Don't forget to change 200XXXXX to your actual system folder.

The above shortcut will just copy any future PHP extensions to the cPanel default directory for installed PHP extensions.

3. Still logged in on WHM, navigate to "Software" >> "Module Installers" then click on "manage" next to "PHP Pecl", search for "APC" in "Find a PHP Pecl" and then choose to "Install" in the APC result that will come up.

That's it!

Now, if you wanna make use of APC on your Joomla! 1.5/1.7 site, go to "Global Configuration" and choose to use "Apc" instead of "File" for the cache setting. Using "Apc" instead of "Database" for the sessions didn't work for me in Joomla! 1.5 last time I checked. Perhaps it now works with 1.7+.

You may also wish to tweak "apc.shm_size" in PHP's configuration and raise this limit from 32 (MBs) to 64 or 128 depending on your server's capabilities. For very busy sites, you may want to consider switching off "apc.slam_defense" and "apc.stat". For more on APC's configuration options, visit: http://php.net/manual/en/apc.configuration.php

UPDATE: APC provides a detailed look at what is happening with your cache and, with GD enabled in PHP, also shows you graphs of the situation of your cache. And all this via your browser! After you follow the steps above and install APC successfully, copy the file /usr/lib/php/apc.php into your website's "live" path and access it via the browser. Just remember to change permissions of apc.php to the user whose website you're moving the script in.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Elegant way to pass on your primary Joomla! RSS feed to Feedburner

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 08:20:00 -0800

We all know Feedburner. The cool service offered by Google that makes distributing your RSS feed a lot better with analytics, various RSS feed reader support and so on...

If you wanna use Feedburner, you just sign up for the service with your Google account on http://feedburner.google.com and then provide your "home page" RSS feed (usually something like mywebsite.com/?format=feed). Feedburner will in turn give you back a new RSS feed link (something like feeds.feedburner.com/mywebsite) which you can use to "proxy" people who read your feeds via Feedburner and enjoy all the goodies the service can offer.

Now, the dead simple way to add your RSS feed link on your Joomla! site is:

a) add the related <link ... /> code on your template's <head>...</head> tags

b) use mod_custom (or some other similar extension from the Joomla! Extensions Directory) to add a direct link to your Feedburner RSS feed link or a nice button to do the same thing (see for example http://brian.teeman.net - "Follow me" button on the right column)

Obviously the second option is highly recommended as users who don't notice that orange or blue icon in the URL bar of their browser, can easily subscribe to your Joomla! site's RSS feed.

But if you go with the first option too, you will end up with 3 RSS feed links listed in your <head> tag, that may confuse your visitors. The first feed will be your Feedburner one and the other 2 the feeds that are automatically generated by Joomla! for the two available feed formats (RSS and Atom)... These 3 feed options will show up when your visitors click the orange button (e.g. in Firefox) or the blue button (e.g. on IE or Safari) in the URL bar of their browser. See the screenshot below:

So here's a neat trick to further control the feed link that shows up in these feed buttons on your visitors' browsers... Let's suppose you want to server the Feedburner feed link only on the "home page" of your Joomla! site. First of all, we need a way to determine the visitor is ON the "frontpage" (or "home page", call it what you like...).

Open up the index.php file of your Joomla! template and right below the "defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );" line, add the following snippet:

$document = &JFactory::getDocument(); // Determine if we are on the frontpage $menu = &JSite::getMenu(); if($menu->getActive() == $menu->getDefault()) $isFrontpage = true; else $isFrontpage = false; // Cleanup Joomla! default feed links only for the frontpage if($isFrontpage) unset($document->_links);

This code snippet will "turn off" the feed links created by Joomla! (automatically) on the frontpage of your site. But only for the frontpage of your site.

You can then go on and add your usual Feedburner feed link right before the "<jdoc:include type="head" />" snippet within your <head> tag. So you end up with something like:

<link href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My site feed" /> <jdoc:include type="head" />

Now when a visitor on your site requests for any other page (than the frontend), will get 3 feed links, your primary (which comes from Feedburner) and the 2 auto-generated by Joomla!.

The applications of this are limitless obviously. You can either completely disable all auto-generated Joomla! feed links and pass on one common feed link on all pages, or create different Feedburner feed links and set them individually on your Joomla! pages based on specific criteria (e.g. for the "major areas" in your site).

You can see how implemented this trick on sites like www.gazzetta.gr (fixed Feedburner links plus Joomla! feed links), brian.teeman.net (Feedburner link only), magazine.joomla.org (Feedburner link on frontpage only).

Permalink | Leave a comment »

I have no words!

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:03:00 -0800

You will understand why I posted this pic after you finish reading the first paragraph... I have no words... I do know however what my next avatar will be ;)

Read the original post by Abbie here: http://www.designstheweb.co.uk/blog/joomla-extensions-my-top-five.html

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Thoughts on the upcoming redesign of joomla.org

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 12:18:00 -0700

A few comments on the newly released mockups for the redesigned joomla.org coming soon...

The frontpage of the site is missing many things. Let's start from top to bottom...

The slideshow navigation may be confused with the actual content being on top. A better front/back control would fix that. Also, titles in "italic" is really too much. The font is just fine to display "normally".

Moreover, it's missing important elements for newbie users and not only.

First, it's missing an "about" block. What is Joomla in short? If I were a newbie I'd have no idea what this site is about.

Newbies should also see a block with resources like: "New to Joomla! Get started" and a list of things to do (what Joomla is, read the intro guide, how to install, where to seek help etc.).

There should also be only one block for news/announcements. Having stories dating a month back in your frontpage is not that good.

It's also missing links/buttons to the social channels Joomla! has a presence on like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc. A block with the latest official Tweets would not hurt too.

A block with a few screenshots would also be good to quickly show users of other CMSs what Joomla looks like, as it's one of those CMSs with a distinct backend and not one that mixes frontend/backend all in the same place (cough Drupal).

We have a great video for Joomla!, called Joomla-la-la. It would be uber cool to have it there. Shows visitors that there are dedicated and fun people involved in this community. We're serious at what we do, but we're not M$ serious.

It would also be helpful to have a random showcase of sites built with Joomla!. That could be a feed from the featured picks in the Joomla! Showcase site.

As you can see, there are many things to add in the frontpage. The joomla.org redesign team could do that in several ways, without sacrificing height (e.g. using tabs or sliding panels).

Oh, and btw: the inner page/Forum page has the "active" menu wrong ;)

What do you think?

(this post was submitted as a comment to the joomla.org post as well, slightly modified...)

Permalink | Leave a comment »

Advanced K2: Leveraging the power of Joomla! and K2

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 06:15:00 -0700

Presented by Fotis Evangelou at J and Beyond 2010.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

K2 for Beginners as presented on J and Beyond 2010

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:37:00 -0700

This is the introduction/beginners presentation for K2 given at J and Beyond 2010.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

K2 v2.3 is now available! Content bliss for the masses!

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:31:00 -0700

It's here folks! The most stable, consistent & feature rich version of K2, version 2.3, is now available to download on: http://getk2.org

See it running on the official demo site at: http://demo.getk2.org

Grab your copy right now. If you're upgrading from a previous 2.x version, simply upload on top. If you're new to K2, install the package and then import some content from Joomla! by going to Components >> K2 in the backend and then hitting the content import tool in the top right corner!

For a list of features available in 2.3, check out: http://community.getk2.org/profiles/blogs/k2-version-23-the-most-stable

Permalink | Leave a comment »