Virtuemart 2 on Joomla 2.5

It seemed like such a long wait for Virtuemart to release their new version 2.0 which would finally be compatible with Joomla 1.7. However now Joomla has released their new version Joomla 2.5. So once again I'm unsure if the two latest versions will work together. Only real way to find out it seems is to try it. 

I started with a fresh installation of the Joomla 2.5 with no sample data installed. I then downloaded the latest version of Virtuemart which is 2.0.0 and installed via the extensions manager. There was an option to install sample data which I chose yes so I could see faster if there were any issues. To my surprise there were no errors and it installed fine. Below is the screenshot I was greeted with after the install.

Read more: Virtuemart 2 on Joomla 2.5

Kunena Discuss on Joomla 1.7

If you use the forum Kunena they have a plugin called Kunena Discuss which I really like. It uses article comments to automatically create forum topics. This is prefect because it makes your forum look active and it gets rid of duplicate communications. Anyway since upgrading to Joomla 1.7 and Kunena 1.7 (which have the same version numbers just by chance) this great feature was a real pain to get working again.

Firstly, when a guest commented and clicked it did nothing but refresh the page and clear the comment form. Not a good experience for the guest. I also realised that the captcha was not showing. You really need that to stop the spam. 

To date I have not solved this problem and therefore you cannot comment below ... 

Checking the Kunena forums this is the best explanation I could find. There's an issue with caching in general on Joomla 1.7. The Joomla articles get cached after plugins get called and there's no way to turn the caching off. So for now Kunena Discuss on Joomla 1.7 is not available. Best to disable the plugin until its resolved.

CAPTCHA is not properly configured (public key is missing). Please contact site administrator!

Webmaster Crawl Errors and Joomla

How To Create A Consolidated RSS Feed For Joomla 1.7

After I upgraded this site and some others to Joomla 1.7 I was stumped how to create a consolidated RSS feed. The problem is that Joomla seems to assume your home page will be a rolling blog so they provide you with a module to install called Syndication Feeds. This module will automatically create the RSS feed of all the articles displayed on the blog layout page. Sounds good except many websites don't use the top level category blog layout menu item. Especially static sites for small businesses.

To get around this you still need to create a top level category blog but the trick is where to hide the menu item. I created my category blog menu item under my help menu and called it RSS. This way most people will ignore it.

When I initially clicked the new menu link the default settings only showed the categories and no articles. You need to go into the joomla menu options and set them like in the picture to the left. The main thing being that 'include sub categories' must be 'all'.

Now when you click your new RSS menu link it will show all your latest articles. Assigned the syndication feeds modules to the new RSS menu item. Now the page will show the RSS feed link generated from the syndication module.

Finally you have a consoidated RSS feed that you can paste into feedburner. Also don't forget to give the RSS link to google webmaster tools so Google will be happy too.

SH404 Won't Generate URL's

SH404 as of version 3.2.0.1108 seems to have a bug where if you are logged in the back end and have done a url search, therefore limiting the url's it shows in the backend, if you then purge your URL's, it won't generate any new URL's meaning every page you click on will be a 404. This has been replicated in Joomla 1.7 only so I can't be sure if its a bug in other Joomla versions.

To fix the issue simply clear your search filter in SH404 in the back end of Joomla. Then purge the URL's again.

Kunena Discuss Adds a 1 To Every Article

Has anyone else noticed this behavior? Everytime I enable Kunena Discuss on a website running Joomla 1.7, all the articles suddenly show a number 1 in the top left hand corner. I've confirmed it on two websites we host now that are Joomla 1.7 and are using Kunena forums so it seems fairly easy to replicate. Any comments on how to fix it would be appreciated.

As usual with new releases of software I guess its best to just wait for the developers to iron out the bugs.

How To Inprove Bounce Rates

I have recently upgraded a few Joomla websites to version 1.7 and found some interesting results related to how it affects bounce rate.

Faster Loading Times With Caching

The first and foremost thing I've learnt is that enabling caching lets pages load faster and when pages load faster the visitor is happier. After one particular website upgrade I checked Google analytics and was amazed to see the bounce rate had dropped from 85% down to 15% and less. Before the migration I had tried all sorts of things to try and lower the bounce rate but nothing ever worked. So why the sudden improvement? The only thing I could put it down to is that Joomla 1.7 has caching enabled by default. Everything else on the site is exactly the same layout. 

Have No Side Bars

Joomla users will be familiar with how modules are assigned to menu items. So if a page is clicked from a menu item, you can choose which modules are displayed alongside the article. By accident a particlualr website was upgraded to Joomla 1.7 and the sidebar modules were not showing. This was an error caused by the SEO friendly url software called sh404. From this I realised the real reason the bounce rate had dropped. Having a full width page article with no modules down the sides was decreasing bounce rate. For some reason when people come across a full width article they were more likely to click the menu across the top of the page to find more information.

If you want to captivate visitors and get them clicking around, then less is more. Get rid of all the busy user options and go minimalistic. Remove all your side banners, side menus and popular article links. Just have a full width page layout with a clear menu structure at the top. This will get you around a 50% bounce rate and that equates to more page views.

Migrating Mosets From Joomla 1.5 to 1.7

I havn't been able to find anywhere the instructions for migrating a mosets tree directory from Joomla 1.5 to 1.7 to I followed a guide for migrating Jomsocial which seemed to work. Firstly you upgrade the Joomla site using jupgrade. You then habe your new 1.7 site in a jupgrade sub folder like www.yourdomain.com\jupgrade. You will notice however that mosets won't be there at all.

Don't install mosets first as it will install a fresh copy with the sample data. What I worked out was go into cpanel and click on the phpMyAdmin icon. This is where you can edit the database. You'll notice the old website has tables that all start with jos_ and the new website uses the tables that start with j17_. What I did was copy the old tables, and switch all the instances of jos_ to j17_.

To do this, click on the export button and highlight/select all the tables that start with jos_mt. I had 25. No need to change any options, just export as a standard sql file. Then open the downloaded sql file with wordpad or similar and click on replace text. You need to replace everything instance of jos_ with j17_

Go back to phpMyAdmin and import the sql file. When you look at your database you'll now see all the MT tables with a j17_ prefix in there. It's at this point I installed Mosets and if any database updates needed to happen it should sort it out. I'm not sure if does make any changes though. You can now look at your new website in the jupgrade folder and click on the directory and see all the listings.

But there's some more to do. Images need to be copied from the old site to the new site as well. The old images are in components/com_mtree/img/listings and 3 folders called M O and S. I used firezilla to download the 3 folders and upload to the same path in the jupgrade folder.

If you need a hand migrating your mosets directory to Joomla 1.7 send us an email for a quote.

Virtuemart on Joomla 1.7

In short if you have a Joomla 1.5 website that relies on Virtuemart, I wouldn't go beyond 1.5.3 yet. Virtuemart are still only at RC2 for Joomla 1.6 and none of the modules work yet. I thought I'd have a try at upgrading though to see what happens.

First thing I did was take a full site backup so I could rest at ease as I butchered the site. I went ahead and downloaded the Jupgrade component and when I tried to run the upgrade, it kept hanging on the checking requirements screen. The Jupgrade instructions recommend to uninstall anything that is J15 only which includes Virtuemart. Then I continued disabling plugins until it eventually ran.

You then realise that your site is still the same because all that Jupgrade has done is create a second site in a sub folder called /jupgrade. So you need to go in via an FTP client and blow away the old site and move all the jupgrade contents to the root folder.

First thing I noticed is that it was version 1.6.3 of Joomla which then needs to be updated to 1.6.5 to be stable. And virtuamart was gone because I had to uninstall it to be able to upgrade Joomla. I then installed virtuamart 1.9.8. On the virtuamart site they say the core is compatible with Joomla 1.6 however when I installed it I just got a PHP error. It was at this point I confirmed for myself that if virtuemart is required then its best to stay with Joomla 1.5.3 for now.

How To Get A Top 100000 Rank in Alexa

To get into the top 100,000 in Alexa ranking means your website would be well and truely established and you should be able to easily make a living from it. At this level the Alexa statistics become accurate and will match your google analytics statistics. Advertising companies will welcome you, even chase you for business. This article will explain the do's and don'ts I've worked out over time using trial and error.

Traffic Required for Alexa Milestones

1,000,000 To get in the top 1 million sites you will need around 250-300 unique visitors a day

500,000 To get in the top half million sites you will need around 500-600 unique visitors a day

100,000 To get into the top hundred thousand you  need around 2500 unique visitors a day

Get Inbound Links

Links in to your site are the most important. Its how people get to your site and it also increases your google page rank. And the higher your page rank the more search engine traffic you get. These links need to build slowly over time. Just once or twice a week make some comments in forums and on blogs that are on the same topic as your site. Put your sites link in your signature or in the comment. If you go spamming everyones forum to quickly with links to your site, you may even be penalised by some search engines. So its key to do it slowly and naturally.

Write Great Content

Content is king when it comes to getting the attention of search engines. Never copy and paste other peoples articles, it will just be ignored or even penalise your site. For me articles that contain at least 300 words seem to get the most traffoc. Break the article up into sections like this one has been with titles for each section using header tags. Search engines read the header tags to get a summary of the content. Try to use two images but not too large. Too many pictures that are slow to download also can go against you. And the main benefit of writing good content is that people are more likely to link to you.

Content which is controversial can be good, but be careful not to offend. Content that compares two or three items is good as are reviews of products.

Article Titles

Article titles should be keyword rich and match an exact search phrase if possible. For example, this article is titled "How To Get A Top 100000 Rank in Alexa" which is what I actually searched for in Google myself. Google favors articles when the title is an exact or similar match for a key phrase.

Page Loading Speed

Another metric which helpd generate traffic is how quickly your web page loads. Make sure you use googles webmaster tools and click on the loading speed section for tips on how to make your site faster.

Page Layout

After much experimenting the prefered page layout at the moment seems to be logo on the top left with an easy to navigate menu on the top right. Then content on the left, with all you ads and social media links on a right hand side menu. Then at the bottom have your contact, privacy policy, and terms of use links