Australian Joomla User Groups - Joomla.org.au

Friday, May 18th

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Canberra Meeting 3 May 2011

Quick Summary of the May Joomla User Group Meet Up

Interesting 2 minute presentation:

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Discussion Who has implemented or upgraded their site to Joomla 1.6.3?

Canberra Meeting 6 September 2010

The following was discussed at our meeting:

1. J! 1.5 Security (Boni David)

Security your backend by the following means:

(i) Use a Plugin called jsecure allows you to customise the URL for your administration. For example, instead of www.xyz.com/administrator, you have www.xyz.com/administrator/?[whatever-word-you-want]
(ii) Change the prefix of your database from jos to [whatever-you-want]
(iii) Create a new administrator account in your backend, name is something other than 'admin' and then, deleted the default admin with the ID 62

2. Ecwid for ease with eCommerce with Boni David

An application with Javascript that you can cut and paste into a Joomla! module. Contact Boni via this site to find out more.

3. Updating your site using Update Manager for Joomla!

Marcel demonstrated this extension, which is loaded through your backend.

Steps

Go to Update Manager for Joomla! and download full version (or update if you already have it loaded)
Go to your backend Extensions > Install/Uninstall and install the extension
Ensure you subscribe for security updates at http://www.joomla.org/download.html
When you get notification of a security update, go to your backend, select Update Manager from Components menu
Follow prompts to download update patch
That's it!

It was a great meeting and we look forward to more gems at the next meeting, which will be the first Monday 1st of November (first Monday of October is a public holiday)

Canberra Meeting 2 August 2010

We shared a number of websites for developing ideas and resources:

iPhone & iPad touch home screen icons

Rene Sutherland explained the process of enabling your Joomla! site to render a home screen icon. People with iPhones or iPads will be familiar with these ~ when you save a favourite site to your home screen, it will render as a small icon (like an application icon). Apple automatically gives it a gloss. If you don't have an appropriately sized and named file in the correct location, all the user will get is a tiny version of what the web page looks like - and this doesn't necessarily have a good look. If you want to set up a touch icon, do the following:

Make a version of your favicon 57 x 57 pixels in size and name it apple-touch-icon.png
Upload it to the root of your website

If you want some more information on this - here's a random website found through Google.

Enabling your Joomla! site to render for iPhones and iPads

Rene shared with members a plugin she found called Template by Browser that will allow your Joomla! site to select an appropriate template depending on the browser platform being used.

But there are heaps of others at the Joomla Extensions section.

You need a specific template that will render on an iPhone if you don't just want a smaller version of your website. Template developers such as Rockettheme now make all their templates to render in hand-held devices such as iPhones.

Joomla! capabilities and functionality

Boni David talked about Joomla! being an all-in-one solution for your business. So instead of saying you're going to build a website, say you're going to create an online business. So when you sell it to your customer - don't just say you'll create a website - say you'll create an online business. For example Joomla! can do the following:

Email marketing: used (for example) acajoom to achieve this
Shopping carts: Virtuemart is one popular open source shopping cart that is designed to work with Joomla! or there's Tienda
Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) (Joomla! has an excellent native database development capabilities - but there a numerous extensions that provide more features)

Updating your Joomla! site

David Swanton share with us his success with the extension Update Manager for Joomla! - a component that help enormously in updating your Joomla! site. It does the following:

Checks the latest version
Downloads the particular package for your upgrade
Installs the update
Shows you a report
That's it!

Several members swore by this awesome extension.

Canberra Meeting 3 May 2010

We shared a number of websites for developing ideas and resources:

VirtueMart

Rene shared what she has discovered about VirtueMart shopping cart software and in particular how it has been integrated into the Mynxx template by Rockettheme.

Other members shared the useful things they've found on other sites as follows:

Link Building

Noble Samurai looks at how to build back links to your website to help with optimisation:

NobleSamurai.com/blog/

How to build a Joomla! website

Richard Pearce is especially good at showing you how to work with extensions. Currently he's developing some videos on how to create your own template.

BuildAJoomlaSite.com