basics

• Virtual spring cleaning for your Joomla sites

  Websites take maintenance, and making a habit of performing a little spring cleaning each year can keep a business website running smoothly. The tips below does not apply for Joomla sites alone, any site can benefit from most of these tricks and tips.

• What the alias field is for?

  Sometime we are forgotting the very basics when we are thinking about the SEO for our Joomla website. Did you asked yourself this simplequestion:

  What the alias field is for and how to use it to your advantage?

• What you should NOT do for a good SEO?

  Everybody tells you to do this and do that for SEO, and SEO companies can be very aggressive on their offerings - and misleading on free advices... But nobody really telling you what you should avoid when you want to increase your site's chances to be rank high on major search engines. And more important, nobody is telling you, that search-engine robots are getting smarter with every new release, they are harder to be fooled, and better mimicking/anticipating the real Internet user's behaviors/preferences. Having these in mind, let's enumerate a few bad ideas, known traps weekend webmasters often falling into:

• When the Joomla site is offline, only Super Users can log in

  A client of mine asked this question: "How can I allow registered users to log in and see the site even in offline mode, without giving them Super user privileges?"

• Where is my feed URL in Joomla?

  Today Google returned 500K+ hits for this question, so apparently many of you having problems locating it. The answer is simple: nowhere... or... everywhere...

  ROTFL. Let me explain.

• Where is Yoda Professor?

  

  PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE my young padawan

  Worry, do not, there Yoda Professor is! His old identity just hiding behind. Dark force - Google Authorship - to blame is.

  But still with you, the Force is! Browse around, young padawan, and you need find the help!

  In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.

  If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil. You must unlearn what you have learned. You will find only what you bring in.

  Always pass on what you have learned.

  You will know when you are calm, at peace. Passive. A (Jedi) Joomler uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.

  May the Force be with you.

   

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• Who is the real author?

  The Joomla has a nifty, often used feature, along other information can show the content item's/articles author name just below the title. It's useful especially when the site is maintained by a number of editors and/or contributors. But sometimes - especially when the site is just launched - all authors are the same.

• XML Parsing Error at. Error

  After moving a site to a new server I found this error in the backend - at least one error per page, but casually even more.

  XML Parsing Error at. Error

  No error number, no line number... What a heck!