Jeepstone » Joomla

E-mail could not be sent in Joomla ‘Send to a friend’ popup

Pete — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:13:58 +0000

I recently had a ‘bug’ in Joomla where I’d get “E-mail could not be sent” when sending an article to a friend. The funny thing was, it had worked and I had mail in my inbox to prove it. I tried all the different mail settings and still had nothing. This was when I stumbled on the fact that to prevent spamming of the form, the page needs to wait for 20 seconds before being sent.

If you want to change this, open up Components > com_mailto > controller.php and right at the top you’ll have:

define('MAILTO_TIMEOUT', 20);

You can change this (but leave your form open to spamming), or alternatively add in a better message to tell the user what is going on:

JError::raiseNotice( 500, JText:: _ ('EMAIL_NOT_SENT' ));

change to

JError::raiseNotice( 500, JText:: _ ('EMAIL_NOT_SENT_SPAMWAIT' ));

and then in your Languages > en_GB > enGB.com_mailto.ini, add in

EMAIL_NOT_SENT_SPAMWAIT=To prevent this form being spammed you need to wait 20 seconds before you submit the form.

Remove the generator meta tag from Joomla

Pete — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:07:32 +0000

Sometimes it’s good to keep the fact that you’re running a Joomla site secret. In particular, some hackers might search for the meta tag in your document header saying:

This is easy to fix though, without having to hack the core Joomla code (as you should never do that should you?)

All you need to do is add the following line just after the call to insert the page header:

;
setGenerator('This site isn't written in Joomla - stop prying!'); ?>;

6 useful Joomla! components

Pete — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:04:23 +0000

I thought I’d put together a list of Joomla components and modules that I use on a regular basis or that I’ve had good experiences with. I’m not sponsored by any of these sites, nor have they asked me to post a review, this is just my own personal findings. I hope they help.

Image/Banner Rotation

For me, the generic way to put banners on a site, is with a little bit of cross-fading. To that effect, the Simple Image Rotator is perfect for this. Not only does it have a small filesize, it can also be incorporated into the existing Joomla banner component to rotate these from the off. It’s also free.

For more complex, article/image rotation I’m fond of Frontpage slideshow (same people as above). This comes with 5 or so templates, with nice rotation effects and the ability to put article content into the rotating banner. Styling is simple enough through the CSS and it’s easy to link to articles, menu items, or components. You have to pay for this one, but you do get what you pay for.

Sitemaps and Analytics

For every site I build I pop Xmap this in the footer. Not only does it pop a simple HTML sitemap on your site (dynamically driven) but also a Google XML sitemap, which you can then publish in your Google Webmaster tools. Styling is easy and you can turn off the author signature. In addition, it comes with extensions for lots of different components to allow you to get your Virtuemart products, SOBI items and many more bits of content on the site and into Google.

For Google Analytics I just pop the code in my template – I don’t bother using a module. There are tons out there. Just make sure you get one with the latest Google tracking code in it.

Joomla CCK (Content Construction Kit)

For a long time, Drupal had a big advantage over Joomla in that if you wanted to display a product catalog, or run a blog, or even just show some custom fields in Joomla, you really had to hack around. Drupal had the CCK, which allowed you to define your data and create pretty much any content you needed. With the advent of J1.5, several teams have come up with equivalents, but the best I’ve used so far is K2. The user interface fits well within Joomla (unlike SOBI) and is a very natural extension. You can import your existing Joomla articles with one click. You can create many types of content: Dropdown lists, text, radio buttons etc and it also allows nested categories. Templating uses the simple Joomla template override method.

It’ll be interesting to see how Joomla 1.6 changes K2, but in the mean time, it’s a no-brainer.

Menu Systems

The Joomla 1.5 menu system is pretty decent, but sometimes, when you’re doing some hairy CSS, you need some extra control and that’s where Extended Menu. It’s been around since J1.0 and it’s still as reliable as ever. If you need some CSS styling on your Joomla menu, it’s free and perfect for what you need.

Translations

It’s been Joomfish as long as I can remember. It now comes with a really good set of plugins to allow decent URL rewriting to subdomains etc which is good if you’re struggling with geo-location and Google. The language packs are free to download (as is Joomfish itself). Perfect.

Event Booking

Sometimes you want to let people book attendance at an event (maybe even pay for it). Appointment Booking Pro allows you to setup a calendar with bookable resources. You can choose if people need to pay, how much and at what point they can book. You get a nice (if slightly poorly HTML-ed) calendar, which is AJAX driven and you can get people to pay with Paypal or Clickatell. It’s a paid for component, but when you think how long it would take to build, it’s a steal!

SEO Geo-location, domain names and servers

Pete — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:02:07 +0000

After a client queried the benefit of where the server is located in terms of SEO, I’ve done some research that I thought I’d share with you all.

The background to this is that the client wants to get into foreign markets (France, Germany, Italy). To do this they wish to create translations of their existing website. They have been advised that each website should have it’s own TLD (top level domain such as .fr, .uk, .de) and that the site should be hosted on a server in the relevant country.

This poses some immediate problems. Firstly, you need to have 4 separate hosting accounts, with 4 separate websites. This means you have 4 times the amount of work to maintain, which is not a good use of anyone’s time.

In general I’m talking about Google here, but I’m assuming that most SE’s work the same way. Google does indeed look at both the TLD and the IP of the website. The TLD will (should) take precedence over the IP. This makes sense if you think about it as many companies use cheap american hosting to host their UK websites. However, in the instance where you have a non-country specific TLD such as .net or .com, Google would look at the IP.

Thankfully in Google Webmaster tools you can associate a .com/.net with a specific country. So you could have the following setup:

(also used on sites like Nike.com)
http://www.client.com/fr associated with French content
http://www.client.com/de associated with German content

to go one step further you could setup sub-domains

http://fr.client.com

http://de.client.com

To do this, you would need to add several entries to your Google Webmaster account, which is easier than setting up lots of sites/hosting etc.

Ultimately, you don’t specifically need 4 sites to run 4 different language versions, just a way of assigning the relevant content to the relevant search. It should also be noted that this only effects ’show me search results only from the uk’ searches. I’d reiterate that the most important thing for any of these sites is getting country specific inbound links. Without that you’ll get the same old problems.

How do I implement this on a Joomla site?

I’ll tell you in my next article.

Websites built using Joomla

Pete — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:53:28 +0000

One of the things I’ve been hunting for is a list of ‘big name’ sites that are built in Joomla. However, before I give you my list I need to caveat this. The reason I’ve put this list together is that a client has recently questioned “Why are you using Joomla?”, and this list is not the answer to his question.

However, sometimes it can be useful to show that what you are doing has been done by other people. For instance, “Why have you built my community site in Joomla?”, “Well, because these sites are also community sites built in Joomla and they work very well”.

Ultimately, just using Joomla because everyone else is using it, isn’t the best way to make your decision. It needs to be based on the requirements of the client and the suitability of the platform. However, if you do get into a “My CMS pisses higher than yours!”, this list might help.

Linux.com – The main Linux site
Brazilian Porsche – A localised Porsche site
Fitness First German – The localised Fitness First site
United Nations – The United Nations Regional Information Centre
Danone – “mmmmm Danone” of useless gut yogurt fame
IT Wire – IT news portal
Quizilla – An MTV quiz site
Catherine Tate – Britain’s most hilarious woman(!)

Open content in a modal pop-up in Joomla

Pete — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:31:22 +0000

Have you ever wondered how to open an image or a Joomla page in a modal popup (one of those where the page background dims and a new page loads in front)?

To open a modal popup, you need to firstly ensure that you have the right bit of javascript loaded in the page. To do this, open your template and place the following line in the

JHTML::_('behavior.modal');

This loads the Joomla code that shows the popup.

Next you need to write the link to open the content. You can do this either as a Joomla content item or just an image. Let’s do the content item first.

Open your content article and find the link you want to open in a popup:

Link to a normal page

change this to

Link to a modal popup

Notice we have a class added to the link called ‘modal’. This means that Joomla will find any link with that class and open it as a modal pop-up. We can take this one step further and specify the size of the popup.

Link to a modal popup with a dimension of 680px by 370px

If you want to modify the template for the popup, look in your templates folder for the component.php file. This is the file we are targeting by using the tmpl=component. You can then adjust this file to suit.

If you want to open an image simply replace the href=”" with the path to the full size image.